Media 2.0 at the grassroots

Last week my boss just dropped by and asked to do some research and study on Media 2.0! I was fairly baffled. Everywhere I looked around there was 2.0. Banking, Insurance of course Travel and now Media!! The word 2.0 seems to be the most used word today. I of course dutifully nodded and got down to work (i.e. search God knows what will happen if there is no Google...)

Expectedly, the Web 2.0 Guru Dion Hinchcliffes has an opinion on this. He feels the online video industry is what comprises media 2.0. Some else felt social media (your Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 etc.) is also media 2.0 and should be considered as such. Elsewhere people felt that television companies making their online presence more aggressive, adopting RIA and ensuring availability of online digital content was what media 2.0 was all about.

One of the experts had recommended that since the web 2.0 is all about participation and user generated content, the first thing a media company should do is to enable a user to participate through blogs or comments or what not. Thus started the media 2.0 bandwagon. Of course the big warning by the gurus was that, to ignore this would be a great risk for an organization.

Media as I understand (I am a GenX’er) is television channels, newspapers, magazines. I believe this is called mass media. They have another term called ‘New Media’ to refer to digital or networked media. The web falls into the category New Media. The ever faithful wikipedia has a detailed description for ‘New Media’.

All top television channels worldwide have a strategy to handle New Media. Just check out BBC’s vision for handling New Media. This was way back in 2006. They even had a contest to redesign their web site. Their current website is complete IGoogle style filled with widgets and users can personalize and add and remove widgets of choice. They incidentally ran their new web site as a beta for several months before they brought it to mainstream. This seems to have paid off as BBC’s website has more than 15 million unique users per month far higher than its competition in UK.

New Media strategies also involve making available online videos. These are offered either as streaming or download. BBC has iPlayer and Channel 4 has a concept called 4oD (4 on Demand) catering to online video demand. In the case of BBC latest shows are available for download post the airing on television. BBC has on demand services for video, radio, and news delivered online and through digital TV. Archives of old TV shows which were very popular are another lot that are gaining popularity.

As per BBC’s director general Mark Thompson the definition of a broadcaster in the 2.0 world is someone who is able to deliver high quality content across multiple channels (web, moble, digital TV , etc.) , have a good web site apart from some traditional TV and radio !!!

Of course all this is backed by hard statistics. ComScore said that 73% of US Internet users are viewing video online and within that group, the average person is watching nearly four hours each month. We have seen evidences that the networked generation (especially the Gen Y) is moving away from television and newspapers in favour of online content through the internet and viewing the same through multiple devices like laptops, mobile devices or IPods. Another feature of this generation is that they switch devices and expect the content to transition seamlessly. Broadband connectivity has almost become standard in most homes and is one of the main reasons for the focus shift to online content.

Another interesting point is that all forays into new media are accompanied at the backend with SOA and agile development practices like SCRUM. Channel 4’s video on demand has SOA at the backend, while BBC has decided to invest in SOA to increase digital content distribution efficiency across multiple channels. ITV another top broadcaster in the UK has also adopted SOA for business flexibility and interoperability among its key divisions. SCRUM was adopted by BBC for its New Media division as they felt that needed to use agile development due to the change and uncertainty in this space.

Video-on Demand opens up amazing possibilities for us consumers. We can download and watch shows at leisure, we can skip ads, and we can watch archived programmes. The television of yore was catering to a mass audience but on demand video is targeted and can cater to a niche. (The Long Tail!!!). The biggest advantage of media 2.0 is its ability to make content available to far more people than the one who originally paid to watch it in the first place.

Now for the million dollar question: what are the returns from this spend. Will this mean increase in advertising revenue? One of the biggest advantages of the internet is contextual, targeted advertising and the ability to complete the sales cycle with a purchase. There have been enough evidences to support that TV advertising is losing its sheen. While experts agree that television is still the best means to reach a mass audience, they feel that digital video popularity is making the 30 second commercial spots less effective. The focus of all advertisers is to grab eyeballs as they call it. They are thinking of ways and means to position commercials on digital video and ensure consumer attention is retained. There have also been recent reports suggesting that online spends have surpassed TV advertising in the UK, but we need to examine them more realistically.

So this is Media 2.0. As a parting note: Let us not forget that YouTube is still way ahead of competition in online video viewing. Although we have the web only channels like Joost (from the creators of Skype), it does not seem to be very popular. The super success of YouTube may mean that consumers on the web have different viewing behaviours and sharing mechanisms as opposed to the traditional forms.

All said and done we, consumers are all set for a great time with channels and ads lining to woo us. Now it is left to the content creators to make this medium worthwhile through great and watch able content.

PS : My Boss has a great blog on advertising and media 2.0 , but mine is more at the humble grassroots level

Mobile Enabling an Enterprise

There is a lot of talk about mobile applications nowadays. Everyone feels that 2009 will be the year of the mobile. The success of the IPhone and the App Store concept from Apple may be fuelling these predictions. All enterprises want to be mobile enabled. No one wants to be left out of the race.

As you can see from examples Banks are offering mobile banking in a big way - Bank of America, Wachovia, Citibank, Wells Fargo , ING etc. to name a few. Airlines are adopting it and see it as the next big opportunity to communicate with passengers about on-board services, rebooking options, baggage pickup and ticket purchases etc. Mobile boarding passes are in (completely paper less like Continental Airlines). Back home our very own ICICI Bank (my favourite whipping boy) is offering mobile banking.

We all know how fractured the mobile market is. This is exactly opposite to the scenario in the PC world. For us software developers, Microsoft has done a huge favour by creating a monopoly and almost standardizing the PC world. We do not have the headache of creating applications to run on more than 2-3 platforms (Windows / Linux / Unix and rarely Mac). In the case of web applications we can dictate that the application will run only on IE browser and get away with it!

Once the action shifts to the mobile world things are not so rosy! First thing you do not have a market leader. You do not have a standard platform. You do not have a standard browser. You have a wide array of small players successful in their own niches. And to add to this you have geography specific usage patterns.

Then, there are the regular phones and the so called smart phones. Gartner defines a smart phone as "a large-screen, voice-centric handheld device designed to offer complete phone functions while simultaneously functioning as a personal digital assistant." How different is it from a PDA? Seems like both are converging, with PDA’s offering phone capability. (Check this out)

Symbian is the number 1 in the Smart phone market while Microsoft leads in the PDA world. Symbian is hugely successful in Europe and the rest of the world. But let us not forget US where they are almost nowhere. In the US smart phones are dominated by Blackberry, IPhone, Microsoft. But these are smart phone market numbers which were incidentally only 10% of the total mobile market in 2007. Mobile Web is big in Japan, in fact bigger than PC Web. Last but not the least is China where Linux based phones are hugely popular. Please remember, I have not mentioned Android despite all the hype as there is yet no single phone which is running that platform. Apart from this there are the regular phones (which are not so smart!). As per IDC 334 million handsets were shipped in the last quarter of 2007. Our own India is the 2nd largest mobile market in the world with around 250+ million connections at the end of March and SMS dominates our lives!

So what are the choices to develop mobile applications?

• Browser Based
• Downloadable applications
• SMS Based

Wrt the choices of mobile application development platforms: Read this blog from my colleague Deepesh to understand the various mobile technologies.

The biggest problem in mobile application development is fragmentation due to differing device capabilities and a lack of standard platform supporting 90% of the devices. This is applicable to downloadable as well as web applications. (Read this blog by Simon Judge)

And given a mobile phone what are its limitations? Screen size definitely. No matter how big the screen is the device still has to fit into our pocket. Then is the battery, processing power, bandwidth availability, reliability of connection just to name a few.

Standard platforms like J2ME are very popular for creating games on mobile phones. While JAVA was projected as a common platform for creating applications across mobile phones, the reality is that there are still implementation differences across devices, which lead to severe maintainability issues.

However Mobile as a market is very attractive. Just look at the market numbers. Recent statistics suggest that the number of mobile phones in the world is higher that the total of PC’s, printers, monitors etc. Staggering!! And a mobile today is almost an extension of a person. Everybody you see is on a mobile. Also the spend on mobile advertising is far less compared to web advertising. So it is clear that there is a huge opportunity here. The question is how does an enterprise tap this?

If an enterprise wants to go mobile, it wants to cater to the maximum number of users. Given the size of the device it is not practical to offer a mobile version of the entire business application. Enterprises need to consider the following aspects:

1) Identify which parts of its applications it wants to mobile enable
2) Will mobile enabling mean ease of use for a consumer?
3) Which technology to use?
4) Which geographies to target?
5) Is mobile web a viable approach?
6) What are the types of handsets in the geography of choice?
7) Who are the major operators? (May need tie ups with key operators)
8) What proportion of mobile users are expected to use the application?

A clear requirement is that an enterprise’s application should be ubiquitous (means easily available I believe). Given the variations in technologies, devices etc., it makes sense for an enterprise to either focus on the lowest common denominator of technology availability or make applications available across the entire spectrum of technologies!!

Again let us look at my favourite example, ICICI bank. As I mentioned above they have launched a mobile banking service. They have chosen to go through route (2): make it available across the spectrum of technologies as much as possible. Just take a look at their mobile banking page. They offer services through downloadable applications (J2ME based), web, and SMS. And their downloaded application has the ability to connect to their services through GPRS or SMS depending on what the user has subscribed for! If you look at the download options on their site your will find numerous versions of the applications which are manufacturer and device specific even though they have used J2ME to develop the application.

Yet they have not covered the spectrum of service providers in India. For example they clearly say that: 1) a non JAVA enabled phone user cannot use the application, 2) If a user changes device, he should download a new version of the application, 3) the application will not look identical on all phones (depending on the visual interface of the phone) and last but not the least this will not work on CDMA mobile connections. Even their SMS version is only available to GSM users.

Given the number of versions to be maintained this clearly looks like a maintenance nightmare! And we have not answered the million dollar question yet, which is how many people actually use this service after all this trouble.

So for an enterprise what is the strategy? Do they wait and watch? Or do they jump in so that they have a presence ahead of their competition.

Mobile web seems to be the next big thing. There seems to be emerging standardization in the mobile browser world. There is also a reduction in the cost of data rate plans for mobile internet. IPhone with its full function Safari browser, is an example of how mobile web is becoming popular . But we are back to the question of, will it be supported in more than 90% of the devices belonging to the potential user base. With the price of smart phones falling and technology constantly improving maybe in 1-2 years browsers will become standardized, in which case first movers will definitely have an advantage. There are also some encouraging statistics for enterprises. Bank of America (which offers a mobile web solution) says that it has more than one million mobile banking customers.

As a parting note, let us also not forget that Apple has provided the SDK in this version of IPhone and the App Store has been extremely successful even though it is only a month since its launch. Nokia has open sourced Symbian and Android based phones are just round the corner. So wishing you all the very best in mobile enabling your application !

Enterprises and Consumers

Continuing on my thoughts on web 2.0, I wish to focus on what enterprises are doing in the web today and whether they are reaching out to those that they wish to target i.e. their consumers

Web 2.0 has changed the way an enterprise reaches out to a consumer. Earlier the focus was more on what the enterprise offered i.e. Consumer used a specific service because it was there. He could not demand for a feature or an offering. Enterprises only thought of what they could offer and not of whether the consumer would actually benefit from such an offering. Their offerings were the latest and state of the art in technology. Alas! Usually the usability of the offering left a lot to be desired.

For example: Bill Payment is offered by ICICI bank. They have extensive options like ‘Presentment Mode Biller’, ‘Payment Mode Biller’ and ‘Shopping Mode’ on their site. ‘Payment Mode Biller’ means that a consumer can only pay bills but a ‘Presentment Mode Biller’ means that a consumer has the added facility of viewing and paying a bill. Sounds great! Doesn't it.

The sum and substance of this is that, if for example you have a BSNL (Bangalore Telephone Bill) Bill that you urgently want to pay since due date is approaching (I had this problem 2 days back) and hence you log in to ICICI bank web site you will be told that this is a ‘Presentment Mode Biller’ and you can register for and pay this bill only from the next billing cycle! Same is the case with a few other banks as well. So as a consumer I have no choice but to rush to the nearest billing counter for making a payment. – Consumer Focus or Enterprise Offering?

Coming back to web 2.0: the new mantra seems to be consumer focus. Get the consumer (actual end user not middle men) to participate, contribute and give feedback to help applications evolve. The term ‘Prosumer’ has been coined. We have huge companies like Amex , Fidelity now running beta labs (earlier beta programs were the bastion of Microsoft and of course with Google everything is a perpetual Beta ) which give the consumer an opportunity to try out new ideas and revert. Amex even lists ideas which have graduated to mainstream and those that are discontinued. We even have airlines websites on the verge of starting beta programs.

Maybe if someone from ICICI Bank had done a beta program and sought feedback on whether offerings like ‘Presentment Mode Biller’, ‘Payment Mode Biller’ are acceptable to a simple user like me they might a got a different response.

More on this in my next post. Meanwhile, here is an interesting post from Dion Hinchcliffe about beta programs, which is still relevant.

Is User Generated Content Credible?

I have been doing a lot of study on the so called ‘Travel 2.0’ the trends and happenings. I thought I should share my thoughts on the topic for whatever it is worth.

User Generated Content (UGC as it is called) is something that I have been coming across fairly consistently. Analysts have been raving about it. Companies have been built around it. Everyone and Anyone wants to provide a facility for the user to write his bit. They say this is what Travel 2.0 is all about - collaboration and sharing and participation and any travel enterprise that is not in this can expect to be completely driven out of business.

One thought that keeps puzzling me is are there enough users to write that much of content? If we look around we are inundated with sites which offer us a chance to write our views, opinions, maintain our travel journals, give reviews and the like. Just to name a few - TripAdvisor, IgoUgo, Yahoo Travel , Lonely Planet and many more. Each claims to have millions of site visits and is filled with UGC (or so they say). TripAdvisor is supposed to have more than 10 million reviews, 6 million+ unique visitors and about 1.4% of visitors have written reviews (src: Compete Inc ). And this is just one of the sites. Apart from this you now also have the booking sites like Expedia, Orbitz, airlines (SouthWest), hotels (for ex: Sheraton) soliciting UGC. And you have many more just waiting to jump on the band wagon.

One thing is sure. Any prospective tech savvy traveler today likes to understand what others are saying about a place , a hotel or a flight , tips , tricks , regulations etc. and the web is the only place where such information is freely available. But how do we sift through the masses of content and find what is useful. Can we trust the content that is available? Normally we come across widely diverse opinions. “Loved it!”… “Hated It ..!” Glowingly written content about a specific service may be ad spiel from the service providers themselves. A very disgruntled post may be some kind of extreme frustration in an exceptional situation or the case of a competitor bad mouthing the service.

It makes sense to take all reviews with a grain of salt. A scathing review, with no other writers complaining may be a one off case. Conversely a glowing review in the midst of complaints could be bogus. Some sites are taking measures like allowing users to rate posts. On some sites like IgoUGo, the editors do the rating. Certain others like Boo use algorithms like IP checks to prevent multiple reviews form a single source. On Expedia only travelers who booked their stays through the site may comment upon a hotel. TripAdvisor has this concept of trusted reviews where a user can choose to read reviews from his or her trusted friends.

Semantic search seems to be emerging as a possible solution, where the retrieval of data is not just based on key words but on comprehending the text, resolving the ambiguities in the language and retrieving relevant content. We have seen Microsoft acquire Powerset and Twitter acquire Summize to be part of this new avenue.

Recently a semantic travel search site (Uptake ) has also been launched which claims to aggregate hotel reviews written in more than a 1000 sites and collate the content and rank the hotels. The site says that it is strictly about aggregation of reviews and semantic analysis and doesn't actually do any booking. Incidentally this site has been launched with the intent of helping a traveler not be overwhelmed by the information available and help the job of making travel decisions easier!

But the question is- is this enough? Again can we trust the source of data? For a traveler it is better to get a balanced picture by speaking to trusted friends, talking to travel agents, visiting multiple sites and finally leaving something to chance.