Latitude

This post belongs to a 3-part series on emergent device-content experiences:

1. Follow Me Wherever I Go: The Next Level in Shifted Media [problems & solutions] [opportunities]

2. See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me: Growing Expectations for Immersive Content Experiences [problems & solutions] [opportunities]
3. Devices in Disguise: Ubiquitous Connectivity Births Multitasking Gadgetry [problems & solutions] [opportunities]

Earlier this week we foregrounded the problems (user needs or desires) and emergent solutions surrounding immersive content experiences.

The key is to push beyond novelty for the sake of itself and to deliver experiences that are layered in meaningful ways, meeting multiple user needs.

1. Build on current behavior. Improve on the immersive experiences users are already creating for themselves via popular platforms/applications. Shazam and Dockers’ Super Bowl play adds a new (and rewarding) layer to existing music-tagging inclinations by fusing product information with the “exploratory” appeal of accessing exclusive content and a contest call-to-action.
2. Tie visceral benefits to more immediate needs. Touchscreen technology is not compelling solely because it’s cool, but because it actually makes it more intuitive to navigate content and features, improving one’s overall experience with devices.

   3D proponents should take a cue by pushing past the novelty angle and connecting 3D with a more immediate desire – e.g.) information access or play.

   Beamz is an excellent example of pushing the visceral interaction to offer an added benefit—meaningful participation in the creation of content itself.

3. Immerse but don’t isolate. Tread carefully when offering add-ons that cut viewers off from interacting socially with those who don’t have the same privileged level of access. Watching something in 3D is no fun if it means the person sitting next to you without glasses is having a sub-par experience. Embed new social payoffs that consider both parties and find a way to ensure there is enough common ground between levels of interaction.

Latitude is a research-driven consultancy for technology and media companies. We work with clients to discover and develop opportunities for next-generation content, software, and communications technologies through a combination of web-based applications and innovative research methods. Email ischulte@latd.com to learn more about working with Latitude.

Header image courtesy of good-karma’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

This post is part of 3-part series on emergent device-content experiences:

1. Follow Me Wherever I Go: The Next Level in Shifted Media [problems & solutions] [opportunities]

2. See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me: Growing Expectations for Immersive Content Experiences [problems & solutions] [opportunities]
3. Devices in Disguise: Ubiquitous Connectivity Births Multitasking Gadgetry [problems & solutions] [opportunities]

In yesterday’s post, we discussed the user desires and emergent solutions around “media-shifting.” Today, we’re extending it into the Opportunity Space.

As devices get easier to use with more varied functionality, the desire to shift content will move from an occasional wish to an everyday expectation.

Companies riding the wave should consider the following:

1. Leverage audio to expand connected spaces.

   Consumers will increasingly want to continue their media interactions even when they can’t sit in front of a screen.

   • Ford leads the way in keeping consumers auto-connected by offering open API app integration to its voice-activated Sync, letting users seamlessly engage with music (Pandora), news (Stitcher), and other media services when they get in the car.
   • Tunebug’s Shake makes physical surfaces carry sound, turning otherwise non-media friendly activities (e.g., biking, skateboarding, etc.) safe by converting helmets into surround-sound speakers.
   • Text-audio conversion technologies proliferate:
     • Bluetrek headset
     • Dragon Dictate and Search app

2. Create smart (and safe) interruptions.

   As users expect content to move with them, they will increasingly want it to happen “smartly.” This means devices that are “conscious” of where they are and what they are doing–automatically reshaping not only content make-up, but also its format and delivery, to fit.

   • Zoomsafer’s Blackberry app detects when the vehicle is moving more than 15mph and automatically responds to calls

3. Offer multiple modes of the same content.

   Content providers should consider offering a range of format types but with simplified and single purchase/access points – with everything from visually-rich formats (for TV time), to audio-enabled (when in the car).

   • The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) is a cross-industry initiative which enables consumers to purchase digital video content from a choice of online retailers and play it on a variety of devices/platforms.

4. Turn the mobile device into a central (and social) hub.

   Place-shifting isn’t just about “me” anymore; it’s increasingly about broadcasting content to friends and family. Integrate sharing functionality wherever possible.

   • MoSoNex allows mobile users to broadcast pictures and live video to a private network of TV and phone viewers worldwide.

Latitude is a research-driven consultancy for technology and media companies. We work with clients to discover and develop opportunities for next-generation content, software, and communications technologies through a combination of web-based applications and innovative research methods. Email ischulte@latd.com to learn more about working with Latitude.

Header image courtesy of edan’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Contributing editors: Jessica Reinis, Ian Schulte.

This is part 2 of The Opportunity Space on digital content. Part 1 focused on e-readers.

Latitude has done extensive work in the media space. We believe in transposing the wisdom and, whenever possible, the applied frameworks from one content platform onto another in order to create novel solutions.

Based on recent studies focusing on interaction across several digital content experiences (Web, music, etc.), we offer the following three suggestions for Web-based digital content–and, more generally, for all digital media experiences.

First, once you’ve gone free: stay free. If you’d like to charge for access, you should be offering new features or content.

1. Intelligent Personalization

   Personal accounts help to customize experiences (and create site stickiness). For high-volume content providers, it would be useful to have dynamically updated, personalized “Fever” recommendations based on one’s interactions with the site in total, rather than singly informed “related post” suggestions.

   Contour to the user, not the content.

   The ability to “favorite,” save, and organize articles for future perusal would also be valuable (Agglom‘s model is a start). Or, borrowing a page (so to speak) from e-reader technology, what if you could highlight and annotate bookmarked digital Web content from a particular provider?

2. Crowd-Contingent Pricing

   Crowd-contingent pricing works especially well with pay-per-piece items (like premium content). In the case of digital Web content–short reports like executive summaries, or exclusive/high-quality content with low production costs and wide appeal.

   The music industry has been innovating new monetization models for some time. Amie Street (which recently partnered with Sony) is an mp3 retailer with a dynamic pricing model; song prices rise according to their popularity, capping out at 98 cents.

   Crowd-contingent dynamic pricing appeals because it:

   • rewards the earliest purchasers (often the most loyal users)
   • provides a sense of transparency to users about the pricing
   • incentivizes purchases by attesting to the quality of the content–it ties price directly to popularity.

3. Tiered Pricing: Customizing Access & Experience

   Based on recent studies with music access, Latitude found that more than half of both free (streaming, sharing, etc.) and paid music listeners deemed access from multiple devices to be a pay-worthy feature.

In a similar vein, you may have heard the WSJ’s report that Apple recently acquired Lala.com, which “lets users pay 10 cents [per song] for permanent access to [a streamable Web browser version that] cannot be downloaded to a user’s computer hard drive or to portable players.”

(Pssst. Grooveshark does the same thing for free–but users pay for premium mobile access, predictably.)

What’s worth paying for has much to do with the experience, which–today–has much to do with access, immediacy, and convenience. (I wouldn’t pay to own it, but I might pay for access to it right now.)

Because digital Web content has always been “free” (for the most part), pricing customization is especially important, alongside the quality of experience. One can pay only for what he needs and, moreover, enjoy the autonomy of customization.

Consider a shopping-cart style pricing model for digital Web content experiences:

Header image courtesy of edan’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Contributing editor: Ian Schulte

This is part 1 of  The Opportunity Space on digital content. Part 2, coming soon, will focus on digital web content.

1. Digital Public Library (or, “Netflix” for the Kindle)

   (If this already exists, we haven’t heard about it. But it sounds so good, we can’t believe it wouldn’t.)

   Most of the e-reader hullabaloo thus far, if justified, has dealt with lending content that one has already purchased, as to a friend (see our #2 for more on this)–not borrowing it for himself.

   But as we move more towards a new sharing economy where actually owning things becomes superfluous in light of continuous, unhindered access to desired items (Netflix, Zipcar, Bag Borrow or Steal)–why own content at all?

   Movies have Netflix, music has Rhapsody, and digital books have… an opportunity space?

2. Temporary “Lending Licenses”

   This notion isn’t a new one. Microsoft’s Zune (“Welcome to the Social”) devices allow users to listen to music and to “spontaneously share” full-length tracks; recipients can listen up to 3 times over the course of 3 days.

   “You bought it. You own it. And you can’t share it.”

   One of the loudest complaints about the Kindle has been the inability to share purchased content with friends.

   Better emulating the “physical” attributes of digital information “objects,” wherever possible, has struck a positive chord with patrons of Kindle competitors–for one, Barnes & Nobles’ new Nook eBook reader, which gets a part of the way there.

   Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the Nook is that it allows consumers to share their e-books with friends [...]. Customers will be allowed to share an individual e-book with one person at a time for up to 14 days.

   After that, they will not be allowed to share that book again, though, so it is not an exact mirror of the physical book world.

   “Live Blog: Barnes & Noble Unveils E-Reader,” New York Times Bits Blog

   Physical books are “rival,” so it seems natural to give up access to my book while my friend is using it–and for her to be able to “possess” it for as long as she needs. Unlike the model for B&N’s Nook, the traditional (“physical”) notions of sharing that I expect and adhere to would allow me to lend an eBook to many different friends over time, one friend at a time.

   The digital medium should make the sharing process more fluid, not restrict access–we needn’t wait to borrow books or trouble ourselves to physically return them when digital “transmission” of content (or permissions) is instantaneous.

   And, ideally, we might still share specific passages, dog-eared pages, and margin notes with a friend to whom we’ve lent a book.

3. Partnerships: Device Manufacturers + Content Providers

   Again, transposing wisdom from other media realms, Nokia’s XpressMusic phones tied subscription-based music downloads to device purchases/service contracts.

   B&N’s Nook currently allows users to receive their magazine subscriptions on the device–but we’ve yet to observe anyone transform this into a viable business opportunity yet.

   When I purchase a device, perhaps someone should offer that, if desired, I can also receive a year of my favorite Condé Nast magazine on it, or opt-in to receive the Wall Street Journal’s digital subscription service?

Header image courtesy of whyisjake’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved; oversized quote courtesy of Michael Critz, “Can I Borrow That?”

Contributing editor: Ian Schulte

Latitude pooled its collective intelligence to identify what we think are five emerging areas of opportunity for smartphones in the context-aware realm (taking into account factors that influence the interactor personally and situationally, including location, time-of-day, personal habits, etc.), which dovetails with last week’s “Opportunity Space” on augmented reality:

The “subsystems” of the emerging internet operating system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage.

No app is an island

Smartphones do what they do well, but they don’t tend to get any smarter in the process; for all its virtues, my iPhone is often just a black box.

“Is the Web getting smarter as it grows up?”

With the exception of some eccentric spellings (autocorrect) and a few sophisticated recommendation apps (Pandora), it doesn’t typically self-refine based upon the ways that I interact with it.

We’d like a little more intelligent discovery built into our smartphones.

My iPhone also doesn’t synthesize in any meaningful way the hordes of personal data that I pour into a variety of different applications daily, nor does it recombine in any innovative way the intelligences of these applications that handle the delineated streams of my mobile life.

5 “Future Requests”

1. Music recommendation apps like Pandora do learn from a interactor’s personal listening history, and recommend novel content based on a song or artist “seed,” refined in real-time by simple “yea!” or “nay!” reactions to each song.

   But, focusing so entirely on the media at hand, they don’t also carry a consciousness of situational factors that are likely to influence musical preference–like location, time of day, and weather.

   (I may prefer my angry-chicks-who-wore-birkenstocks-in-the-90′s redux when at the gym, some smooth jazz when it’s raining, and new music discovery only while walking home from work.)

   Wouldn’t it be nice if they did?

Whatever the algorithmic equation, of course, there’s a listener on the other end who is much harder to decode.

What you want to hear can depend on your mood, or whether you’re listening at work or in a nightclub. Context affects any cultural product.

“The Song Decoders at Pandora,” New York Times Magazine

2. We like the idea of a personal city guide–a Yelp / Brightkite mash-up, with a little of the embedded world thrown in. How about checking into a restaurant (or other business establishment), and assigning it a simple rating (maybe 1-5 stars) based on your experience there.

   “’The network as platform’ means building applications that literally get better the more people use them.”

   Then you could receive other recommendations–even in advance–relevant to both your preferences and the areas you frequent as determined by patterns in your past check-ins. When traveling in a foreign country, you could receive recommendations for this novel environment based upon your personal history.

   We also like the idea of placing QR codes, readable by mobile devices, on the doors of business establishments to make the upload of information easier.

   A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the Internet of Things; it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest.

   We can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other “hacks” that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

   Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“

3. Many people keep information to track their health–logs for diabetes management, diet and exercise, etc.–on their smartphones.

   If you superimposed this wealth of personal health data on the physical world, your phone might point out a walkable scenic route to your destination that would help you fulfill your “calories burned” quota for the day or inform you which nearby restaurants, given the meal-time, mesh well with your particular nutrition preferences (and your budget).

   Being able to intelligently manage and adapt to the gamut of your health needs, your phone might also remind you to schedule a visit with your doctor based upon your visit history and personal health profile.

4. Importing preferences around our behaviors into applications feels redundant and often takes a lot of time. What if you could streamline the input process by scanning a QR code from your receipts with your mobile device–so purchases of your choice could be remembered and applied to future scenarios?

   Think: an automated shopping list based on your actual food purchases–information which you could then apply fluidly to ordering from online grocers if desired, or to alerts of sales and to find new, relevant items of interest.

   We also think it’d be nice to scan a store’s sale offers on the way in (mobile device to QR code), and see how our lists relate to theirs–digitally and intelligently.

   The beauty in the beast

5. Finally… a personal concierge system–fundamentally, a web of the Web with the smartphone as the personal input center–essentially, mapping structured data sets that are currently holed up in individual applications to produce progressively more accurate and texturized interactions between virtual and physical realities.

“We see the era of Web 2.0, therefore, as a race to acquire and control data assets. Some of these assets—the critical mass of seller listings on eBay, or the critical mass of classified advertising on craigslist—are application-specific.

But others have already taken on the characteristic of fundamental system services.”

Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“

Header image courtesy of moriza’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Contributing editors: Ian Schulte, Neela Sakaria.

Latitude pooled its collective intelligence and identified what we think are five emerging areas of opportunity for augmented reality:

1. Social “Gaming”

   We like the idea of social scavenger hunts which involve “marking up” or accessing information that’s been “marked up” by individuals at physical locations; generally, explorations of physical surroundings through collaborative game tactics which serve as social discovery mechanisms–by which we mean, that are both socially gratifying and contextually tied to interactors’ specific physical locations.

2. Learning

People learn best contextually. Take a tour of a historical town through the simulated re-enactment of events that happened there, provided via mobile AR experiences; learn a foreign language by pointing your mobile device at 3-D objects relevant to your everyday surroundings, and receive the translation alongside phrases used in context.

Or how about if your phone remembered which objects you cared to learn translations for, and offered you constantly refined, environmentally-relevant language learning resources? How about if your phone quizzed you about your knowledge later to reinforce what you’d learned?

3. Local Businesses, Tourism, & Events

Expanding the notion of what “information overlaid onto the physical world” means, what if you could project how an article of clothing would look on you without actually trying it on, via an “augmented polaroid”? (This would be the mobile wish-fulfillment of Alicia Silverstone’s futuristic outfit visualizer in 1995′s Clueless).

Or consider the dilemma of where to dine on a little-explored street. Aim your phone at a restaurant and receive the full menu on your screen (in your own language, if you happen to be just visiting a foreign country). From the sidewalk, filter restaurant menus based upon pre-specified preferences: “Show me only vegetarian options.” “Nothing with peanuts or shellfish, please.” “Options under $10 only.” “Just items specified as healthy; I’m dieting.”

4. Civic Engagement

Make civic engagement information available locationally, and render it two-way accessible. iPhone apps like CitySourced, which allow individuals to report civic issues related to graffiti, sanitation, roads, and more, directly to relevant local officials, are stellar foundations for the next iteration of mobile (i.e. AR).

Additionally, the next generation could provide a “download” mechanism for users to see more information relevant to where they are (i.e. criminal reports, zoning regulations, energy usage, etc.), and the ability to”mark up” their present surroundings, rather than sending information off solely to a remote aggregator. More engagement, anyone?

5. Personal Communications

We think it’d be nice to email, tweet, Tumble, Posterous-ize, Facebook, etc.–in other words, share, from a singular point of origin–a hyperlink or a piece of visual media supplied by the rich AR environment around you.

Sharing remote environments is nothing new. AR adds an enriched later of information onto one’s physical environment, and ease of accessibility; ease of sharing (whether one-to-one, or one-to-many) should follow naturally from this commixture.

Header image courtesy of mr_mt_02′s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.