Bradley Howard's Blog

Understanding Pinterest

Feb 16, 2012 at 10:24am

So the latest social network, in fact the best social network since Facebook, is now Pinterest. Barely a day goes by without a top headline story from the likes of LinkedIn and Mashable promoting the increasing take up of Pinterest.

I’ve been using Pinterest for a few weeks now. Since then it’s been interesting to see more people joining and following my ‘boards’. It’s principally the same group of early adopters who keep signing up to the latest new social websites in search of the next big Facebook.

Pinterest is a super-simple concept. If you see something interesting on the web, you ‘Pin’ that content to Pinterest, which inserts a good looking graphic from the interesting page on to a virtual cork board.

In the past, this type of site was called a bookmarking site and would have competed with Digg, Delicious and a thousand other startups which have been acquired by the big .coms (and then spun out again).

Pinterest seems to make bookmarking interesting again through a few simple new concepts:

Grouping ‘Pins’ together as interest groups
Keeping it simply to Pin items to Pinterest
Adopting the ‘following’ principle of social networks

It’s the user interface that’s the knock out factor. There are some key aspects of the site that sets Pinterest apart from other sites, and we’ll start seeing the usability features on other sites.

One of these features is how the site horizontally scales so well. At home I have a large widescreen monitor. I can easily fit a browser window next to a Word window, and Skype or Yammer around those. Looking at Facebook when a browser window is maximised looks ridiculous – a thin sliver of content among a wide, white page. However Pinterest constantly fills the entire screen, adding more content as the browser window expands vertically and horizontally.

There’s no doubting that Pinterest has been growing very, very quickly. The site is still very fast at loading and rendering, despite most of it’s content being graphics.

I don’t think Pinterest is the killer app for bookmarks.

I still use Delicious, mainly because I’ve been using it for several years and have hundreds of bookmarks, but also because most of my links are stored because the content was interesting, not just a graphic on a page.

And I still use Flickr for all my images because BT gave me a Pro account with my broadband package and it stores the graphics in such high resolution.

If I see an interesting graphic on a page, such as an infographic, I typically put it on Twitter and if I need to find it again, I’ll search my tweets.

As for Pinterest, I’m not that sure where it fits in. Most of the boards seem to centre around fashion and food. So maybe Pinterest will end up as a niche site for these industries. Until the next big social network comes along.

tags:

Facebook, design, innovation, social media, trends, usability,

1 Comment

Contactless and mobile payments

Feb 1, 2012 at 8:10pm

On Sunday I popped into my local butcher (they haven’t all been put out of business by hypermarkets) and tried paying using my contactless debit card. At first, the guy behind the till didn’t want me to use contactless because he didn’t think his till could handle it, but I tried and he was amazed how fast the transaction was finished.

We work very closely with one of the big European payments companies, and had been discussing contactless with them last week, and so I told the sales assistant in the butcher that his transaction fees cost less using contactless than chip and PIN. He said that he’d tell his boss.

The timing was interesting because this morning I went to a presentation at Intellect, “Contactless payments: A retailer's perspective” by Julian Niblett from Boots.

Here are some of the key points from the presentation, together with his view of the future, and I’ve added some of my comments as well.

Boots are the second biggest retailer in the UK with 2,600 stores
At the moment a third of transactions use a card
Only 30 stores have contactless - a joint investment with MasterCard
Less than 2% of card transactions are contactless

In terms of the value proposition for the retailer, given a choice between rolling out more self-checkouts and contactless, the former will always win because contactless has far less value to the consumer.

That said, their analysis is that first time customers who try using contactless it will continue to reuse it.

Julian asked how many people in the room have used a contactless card. Around a third put up their hands, which is well above the national average. Julian pointed out that watching consumers use a self-checkout, many people still aren't sure how to insert their card into a card reader properly let alone ‘educate’ them to use another physical method of payment.

One of the issues in Boots’ case is that there’s no business case to offer contactless. Cash is still the cheapest cost at 0.5p per transaction (many of the costs of cash are both subsidised by the banks, and many of the ‘costs of cash’ are fixed).

Also, contactless transactions cost less for a retailer, but the retailers are wary of the payment companies who have usually increased costs once a new technology rollout hits tipping point. This happened with chip and PIN, and retailers expect the same to happen from contactless.

The near term future

· Tfl will use contactless cards as an alternative to Oyster this year. This will help the wider public use contactless more often, and consumers are expected to start using them more often in retailers.

· Visa are going to be helping Boots with a wider rollout across London due to the Olympics.

The longer term

One of the key issues at the moment is that there is no customer demand for contactless. However, retailers can see that there is a demand for using a mobile phone for payments.

We all have more and more cards in our wallets for payment and loyalty schemes. Both of these will move into a smartphone apps, with numerous retailers already leading the way, and PayPal and Google Checkout leading the way with their payment apps.

Julian discussed a great consumer experience all based on a mobile, with coupons, a store loyalty card, payment and electronic receipts, and probably no need for a till at the end of the shopping trip. However there are very few customers who want to shop this way at the moment.

It was a really interesting presentation, and if you’re in the banking or retailer value chain, you should probably get in contact with Julian as he was very open with his analysis and data points (some of which I can’t publish here).

My take on contactless payments is that it will move to mobile, but it will become more complicated for consumers. My debit and credit cards have never run out of battery before – what happens when you want to buy something but have no battery in your phone. In fact, my cards are designed to be much more rugged than my phone – not only do they not require any power at all, they’re also waterproof and shock proof. And therefore they will stick around for a long time.

tags:

Endava, High Street, banking, payment, retail, technology, trends,

0 Comments

Technology will kill

Jan 26, 2012 at 12:06pm

I don't necessarily agree with all these predictions, but they are certainly make you stop and think about what real world objects will be replaced in the near future.

For the record, I think there it's not a case of making these object extinct, it's a case of killing off the majority of them.

tags:

predictions, technology, trends, video,

0 Comments

Eight Digital Media Predictions for 2012

Dec 30, 2011 at 9:45am

To continue what I started in 2010 and 2011, here are my technology predictions for 2012:

1. The Olympics summer of proof-of-concepts

A huge amount of corporate investments will go into the Olympics, so we’ll see them spend their money on sponsorship and advertising more than product development. This will mean we’ll see a lot more cutting edge, proof of concepts (in adverts) rather than market-ready new product launches.

2. Social to level off, but will become a central hub for our activities.

Just like you currently open your browser to look at a number of websites, I expect your homepage will be a Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn page which will then keep you within the ‘walled garden’. Expect to see a close tie up between the social networks and a search engine (Google or Bing).

3. A big tech failure

Expect one of the big websites to collapse which has been too dependent on more and more VC funding rather than its own revenues. We’ll witness the collapse and realise that our own data has gone with it, and then we’ll realise how important that data really is.

4. Mobile payments

It’s been a long time coming, but 2012 will be the start of mobile payments. I don’t think consumers will be paying via our phone in 2012, but you’ll see the banks start the education process using advertising and proof of concepts to enable consumers to see that by the end of 2013 we won’t need a credit card any longer (except when the battery runs out).

5. 3D printers after the Olympics

If it weren’t for the Olympics, I think 2012 would have been the year of the 3D printer. You can already buy them from under £2,000 and that printer will fall as demand increases. 3D printers will compete with Windows 8 for Christmas presents next year.

6. Akamai stock to rocket around EURO 2012 and the Olympics.

The Content Delivery Network Akamai will be covering the two biggest sports tournaments of the summer for most broadcasters around the world. With encoding bitrates (quality) constantly increasing to end viewers, they will be handling record levels of traffic during the summer. More traffic will mean significantly increased revenues.

7. More toolbars

In a bid to keep their logos on the screen in ever more engaging user interfaces, expect to see JavaScript toolbars being used more regularly, sitting like a taskbar inside your browser. This is not to be confused with browser toolbars - I don't think you'll be proactively installing anything.

8. Home automation to make a comeback

Its been possible to connect your household appliances to a computer for many years. The problem has been selling it as a technology rather than a function - and this made it marketable to geeks and no one else. With apps such as Sky Anywhere, people will want to turn their heating up, or switch the oven on while they are commuting home from work.

Photo courtesy of FL08 on Flickr

tags:

3D printing, Akamai, Olympics, mobile, predictions, trends,

4 Comments

Using Groupon and Quidco at Christmas

Dec 6, 2011 at 1:33pm

With so much industry news reported about Groupon, I was asked recently asked for my views on the Internet shopping/ deal site.

Firstly, I have been using a favourite deals site, Quidco, for several years, and this year Mrs H and I have done most of our Holiday shopping using the site, and earned a very nice cashback amount from the site. Quidco has a simple model - it uses the affiliate bounty that is a standard model across the Internet, and gives most of the money back to the end consumer (me) after taking £5 for the year.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of deals and voucher sites on the Internet. If you type in your favourite retailer followed by the word ‘voucher’ into Google, you’ll find an amazing number. Now click on them and chances are you’ll be presented with tens of expired vouchers. With voucher sites, it’s a case of quantity over quality.

Groupon has just turned three years old. It’s model is to offer a limited number of products and sell them to the first consumers who buy those products. After the ‘inventory’ has been sold, the offer is removed from the site.

Deals discounts are usually in the 50-75% discount range. Its the retailer who offers the deals to Groupon, and Groupon takes a further commission in the product.

One of the issues that Groupon is facing is that not all retailers believe the deals are worth that level of discount. When Groupon started business three years ago, the aim was that buy generating a loss-leading sale, the consumer would like the service/ product so much that they would revisit the retailer later.

There are many flaws to Groupon’s business:

It’s a highly competitive market that is very easy to imitate, as demonstrated above
Retailers don’t really want to be part of Groupon’s world because the discounts are huge, and the commission to Groupon is a high part of the remaining amount (i.e. what the consumer will spend)

In November, Groupon turned three years old. It is now in 45 countries. It IPOd last month at $19 per share. A fortnight after floating the stock had halved in value, and is now back to $18.

Groupon’s Q3 2011 revenue was an impressive $430m. It hasn’t achieved a financial year in profit, although Q1-Q3 2011 it has made $22m profit.

In Q3 2011 it made $8m - an unimpressive 1.86% profit. Groupon has a market capitalisation of $12bn. It’s actually quite amusing to go to Google Finance and look at other NASDAQ companies that have a capitalisation less than Groupon, yet earn a good profit.

I don’t see how Groupon’s business is sustainable because of the flaws, and I think we’ll see a trend of ‘lower value’ retailers on the site, which will mean less visitors come to the site and destroying its business model.

In summary, if you’re looking for bargains this Christmas, take a look at Groupon for some ideas. If you are looking to simply have some cashback without any fuss, I highly recommend Quidco. And if you're looking for an investment opportunity, you should look a little deeper.

Photo courtesy of 401K on Flickr

tags:

High Street, affiliate, ecommerce, investment, trends, web traffic,

0 Comments

The future of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Nov 15, 2011 at 9:37am

I haven’t written about social media that much recently after a few readers inside and outside of work criticised this blog for talking about it too much. Lo and behold I was in a meeting recently and asked “I don’t see where Google+ fits in with Facebook and LinkedIn, what’s Google’s strategy?”, of which the answer was worth recapping here.

Facebook background

Facebook started as a platform to link people (“friends”) together. As people used it more and more, messages became more popular, and then businesses started moving in, realising the power of recommendations between social groups.

The problem Facebook has is that everything on Facebook is (or at least feels) quite personal – not private per se, and not necessarily rude, but the kind of stuff I don’t want my business colleagues, customers or suppliers to be reading. I don’t bring in printed photo albums into meetings to share with them, so I don’t want them looking at my holiday snaps on Facebook for the last few years either.

So when I’m investigating a new website for a customer, and I see a ‘Facebook Connect’ signup process, 99% of the time I avoid using it, and fill in the forms separate to Facebook.

One final note on Facebook – we all have tens if not hundreds of “friends” on Facebook. Think about the question that if you wanted to categorise them all into groups, such as “close friends”, “acquaintances”, “work colleagues” and so on, how long would it take? Hold the answer…

LinkedIn background

LinkedIn started as a platform to connect business people together. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is as a job hunting tool; it’s a huge job board full of candidates. It’s one of those perfect balances between supply and demand – lots of people looking for a job and lots looking for a candidate.

The second use is as a sales tool, literally to network with contacts to find out who works within a specific organisation. It’s the ultimate tool to stop the “If only you would have told me you wanted to know someone who works for Company Y, I’d have told you” conversation from happening after spending hours of cold calling.

LinkedIn has stuck to its core focus since day one. It’s remained targeting professional users and staying away from the social (traditional definition) side.

Google+ background

Google have some key advantages with their social network. On the one hand, they have a fantastically high number of users who log in – some 260 million Gmail account users.

As a quick aside – this shows how undervalued Yahoo! are, with 310 million email users. Hurry up, buy Yahoo! and convert these huge traffic figures into massive revenue.

Back to Google+ again – Google has tried and failed a few times (which gives it an immediate experience advantage) to create a social network, and has now launched Google+.

And due to the maturity of the web, and especially some HTML coding techniques, has managed to create an environment which from day one allowed users to setup all their contacts into distinct groups. I asked the question above of how long it would take you to organise your “friends” into groups – and I haven’t met anyone who can be bothered to do so.

So Google has cracked the Facebook (social) and LinkedIn (professional) overlap. It’s very easy to have content which is only visible by social contacts and/or professional contacts. It also has dozens of brands committed to using the platform as well. And don’t forget – advertising agencies spend billions of pounds a year with Google’s advertising platforms. Having the agencies on board from day one is a major advantage.

Summary

In truth I think all three networks are here for the medium to long term. They are not mutually exclusive, and there are tools to link them together. I think brands should be building apps and brand pages for each of the networks –obviously adopting a different approach for LinkedIn compared to the other two.

Photo courtesy of US Embassy New Zealand on Flickr

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, google, social media, trends,

0 Comments

Screens appearing literally everywhere

Jul 27, 2011 at 11:37am

This video has been trending on YouTube recently - it's five months old and has been watched over 14 million times. It's a glass company which is theorising on the future of glass based appliances.

In so far as the video itself is concerned, it clearly cost a lot of money to shoot. Whether it was shown on television I'm not sure - putting it on YouTube and getting an audience of 14 million is worth a lot of media spend.

If the possibility of accepting meeting requests before you've washed your face in the morning is appealing, you'll love this video:

tags:

future, technology, trends,

6 Comments

Why the single mobile device isn't possible

Jun 14, 2011 at 9:33am

A true story (all the stories I tell on this blog are true - it's just this makes the story more dramatic) - I was standing in the kitchen washing the dishes last night whilst watching the television.

I find this to be the second most therapeutic place in the World - the first is in the shower (for more information about why we seem to think clearer in certain positions but never at our place of work, read Future Minds.

Anyway, back to washing the dishes, and I saw the new Sony Xperia Play advert shown below.

This got me thinking the same thing as the R&D guys and girls in every handset company in the World - what is the perfect handset/ mobile/ slate device? By perfect, I mean "what device will take over from all the other devices we own?" I remember conversations in the late 1990s when I worked at the Finnish Telco Sonera (for accuracy, I worked at a subsidary called SmartTrust - now part of G&D, however these conversations took place with the parent company) where we discussed more than 100% penetration of handsets in the World (i.e. more active handsets than people).

Why would people want more than one handset? Because you'd have a super smart/ fashionable one in the evening, an email device with QWERTY keyboard during the day, a sporty/ waterproof one on weekends and so on.

I remember hearing that the market research teams at Nokia (despite the recent bad news I'd recommend anyone with any technology interest to visit their amazing corporate headquearters in Finland) kept hearing that their users wanted tiny phones and massive screens; they wanted as few keys as possible and full QWERTY layouts; they wanted the simple, original, 'flat' Nokia menu and a gazillion functions on the phone. The users wanted the impossible - mutually exclusive functions.

After I'd finished the washing up (we have a large family and had guests that evening - these things take a while), I sat down and caught up on some recorded TV - Secrets of the Superbrands: Fashion when the penny dropped.

We won't be able to have a single device because of the following factors:

Fashion - too many of us want the latest new shiny (or distressed as I learned on the Secrets programme) thing, for the sake of having the latest new thing.
Best of breed. I use the toaster because it makes the least mess; I use the microwave because it makes hot chocolate quickly and without getting a saucepan dirty; I use the oven to roast chicken because I imagine it's going to taste nicer than the small microwave/oven (and I'm worried all future hot chocolates will taste a little chicken-ey).
We want change. I like love Dairy Milk. But every so often I'll have a Flake, or a Twirl or a Wispa. Think of your favourite yet balanced meal - why don't you have it every night?

And for these reasons I don't think the single device to take over our wallet, mobile phone, laptop and paper pad is ever going to come along.

tags:

Nokia, PC, brands, design, future, ipad, laptop, mobile, trends,

0 Comments

The future of technology and payments according to Visa

May 27, 2011 at 9:11am

Photo courtesy of Jack Snell on Flickr

Someone from Visa sent me a brand new whitepaper about Visa's view of the future of technology and payments, the future being the next 3-5 years. The main purpose of the whitepaper is the first in a series of thought-provoking, thought-leadership pieces to discuss in the industry. How they plan to discuss it, is interesting in itself - I'll deal with that at the end.

The whitepaper cleverly pulls together various emerging technologies into 7 key trends. The first 3 are technological and the last 4 are social.

Mobile and identity issues are raised as you'd expect. The future of payments is probably via a phone rather than a card. And pull mechanisms (also called invisible payments or background payments) such as regular top ups such as 'Oyster cards' are going to be more common - including us wearing such devices.

Put it another way - if you travel on the underground, purchase items on Amazon, eBay and the Apple App store, you won't need your card number at any point, because each sites remembers your card details. If I said ten years ago that you'll pay for computer programs, books, music or even second items in the same way as you pay for your electricity -- background payments without referring to your credit or debit card -- anyone would have laughed.

Whilst the continuation of the transfer from cash to electronic is going to keep increasing, I still think there will be a requirement for cash. If you disagree, try and find a tradesman (plumber, builder, electrician, etc.) who deals exclusively in electronic payments and you'll get my point.

At the other end of the spectrum, virtual currencies don't get a mention. My view is that virtual currencies inside websites such as Facebook and especially online games will become huge. At the moment Visa Inc is dealing with these new payment companies by buying them outright.

I'm being negative, however the document does pull together huge topics such as social media, mobile, personal identities, Big Data, invisible payments and cash into a short, clear and concise conversation starter.

And this is where the document falls apart. Visa want to discuss the document by email. That's 10 years ago, not 2011. In 2011 we expect at the very least a web forum to discuss the chapters in the document with industry peers. In 2001 a conversation was between 2-5 people. In 2011 a conversation is with hundreds or thousands. Emailing a mailbox called futurevision@visa.com doesn't entice an open coversation. In 2011 we expect to discuss these matters with thinkers/ people with faces -- not a faceless corporate mailbox.

tags:

cash, future, loyalty, payment, trends,

0 Comments

Away on Thursday and Friday

May 19, 2011 at 9:00am

This Thursday and Friday I’m in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, with all the Account Managers and sales people from Endava for a Customer Facing Unit conference. We’ll discuss the latest trends and industry observations, best practices (internally & externally), all with the aim of collaboration between clients, and how to help them in their businesses.

It’s interesting that these conferences are almost always held in Eastern Europe. There are several reasons why – the cost including flights is the same as using a London hotel; getting out of the office usually helps creative thinking; and connecting our global offices where we do most of our ‘delivery’ can only be a good thing.

The key points for this conference from my point of view are as follows:

The future of System Integrators (aka “IT services” in 21^st century language) are to add value. The future is to provide domain expertise and help propel our clients forward. Not just answering our clients' current needs but helping them with their future roadmap.
Our clients need to collaborate with one another. They have something in common – Endava, and most can work in conjunction with each other rather than compete. This might be working practices. It might be efficiencies learned through one client and able to be transferred to another.
Working with product vendors more, mainly because product vendors [unsuccessfully] try to fit their products into an organisation (and often through the wrong route) rather than understanding a client’s requirements and then seeing if their product will help.

tags:

Endava, IT, Romania, business, future, insight, trends,

0 Comments

Tags

Understanding Pinterest

Contactless and mobile payments

Technology will kill

Eight Digital Media Predictions for 2012

Using Groupon and Quidco at Christmas

The future of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Screens appearing literally everywhere

Why the single mobile device isn't possible

The future of technology and payments according to Visa

Away on Thursday and Friday

Bradley Howard

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