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Digital publishing: When a book is not a book

One of the good things about a holiday period for many people is that it gives them time to catch up on books they have yet to read. Being a techie geek, it was a good time for me to catch up on some new iPad apps.  Getting any face time with the iPad these days is hard, as my 2,5 year old daughter has officially adopted it as hers.  Which is also why it led me to check out what was new on the kiddie front.

One of the more well known children’s books is Spot Goes to School from Penguin Books.  My daughter absolutely loves the little animations and can’t get enough of the mini game where you shake the iPad and have to put various things that have fallen off a table back on. Another brilliant one is Astrojammies, from upstart digital publisher DemiBooks.  Astrojammies uses a great mix of audio, movement and interaction to spellbind kids who are reading it. 

Common for both is that they use an arrow to navigate back and forth – i.e. “turning the pages”, which is clearly how we are used to reading books today. But given the possibilities in the format, and the number of ways a “reader” can interact, is it really appropriate to refer to them as books?  Are they not simply digital experiences? 

 

  

With upstarts like Demibooks blazing trails, this market is poised to shake up the very concept of book publishing in a very short time.  Clearly users have outpaced the publishing industry here, as there are only a handful of good concepts on the market. But talent has not been outpaced, they simply need to see what is possible. My sister in law, who is an accomplished writer of childrens books was spellbound by Astrojammies, so much in fact she got up the next day at 6am to write a script, only to get disappointed to find out that there is a pretty substantial cost in developing this type of “book”. 

Clearly the market is there for the taking for companies wanting to create an eco-system for writers, animators, and digital creators.  And when talented writers discover not only the possibilites of what they create, but that they can actually get feedback on what pages were watched, which paths the readers took, which animations they played with the most etc – the quality of what you will see getting published will be that much better.  Connecting authors with readers to create a “living story” will be the ultimate fantasy for many authors, which is impossible today when most of them are only lucky enought to get a paycheck reflecting the numbers sold.  The future is here, and companies like Demibooks and others are trying to grab it.

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The Social Graph: The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for marketers?

The mantra for successful ecommerce companies has really been to try find an effective way to make word of mouth marketing work. Mark Zuckerberg introduced the term “the Social Graph”, which is really about understanding the links between people, and of course also finding out who influencers are within these networks. The race for data mining this is intensifying especially between Facebook and Google, but also in a host of start-ups and other services like Yelp, Groupon as well as retailers such as Amazon and Wal-Mart.

If you have logged on to Facebook lately, you will notice that they are now starting to map family relationship, match your location with local incentives, and to use their login on pretty much any game or other social network service you consider using, and even what articles or web sites you may like. Sounds scary? With 500m users, who on average connect to 130 people and 80 objects (pages, groups websites) – and create 3 new pieces of data every day (pictures, likes, comments), it means there are 45 billion new pieces of data every month for Facebook to tap (Source: Gigya, Wedbush Social Graph call. See link below)

What is the race all about? Why collect all this data? Gartner recently conducted a survey where they asked the question: “What is the most important thing that you do online?” (“Gartner Predicts 2011”). The third largest activity is shopping, and social activity came in at number 8. And consider that shopping is a social experience in itself, and that advertising spend online, especially from local businesses, is way lower than the actual time spent online, you can see that there is a massive pie of advertising and commerce that is being fought over.

And where is the real battle ground going to happened? Increasingly in your hand. By 2013, the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units.

So how do companies take advantage of the social graph? Is it really the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Wedbush securities recently had a call on thiswhich was great listening and offered a lot of data, but really did not provide any clear direction. The participants hailed the importance of the social graph, but did not specifically say how to take advantage of it. Some examples were mentioned, like Intuit’s experience with Turbo tax, who experienced that that when people who after completing their tax return with Turbo Tax issued a status update on Facebook saying they completed their taxes with Turbo Tax, 5 people checked out the link.

Although the example is interesting, one has to wonder what is the value for marketers? What product/service will have that effect, to cause people to want to announce it in their feed – and for friends to click on it? And at what time do we simply get tired of the spamming from friendschecking in at restaurants, or using products and filter those out? Interestingly, Facebook with all their data may actually start to become the “social graph police” and start monitoring this, as to not allow too much information and possible destroy the real users experience Facebook users are after: hanging out and snooping on their friends (excluding their shopping activities and check-ins). It is a fine line to be threaded by any company sitting on that amount of data.

Furthermore, does having all that data necessarily make you better to predict purchasing behavior and word of mouth referrals? I think the jury is out on this one. I’ve worked with recommendation engines before that worked on pattern analysis similar to what Amazon uses, and those sorts of recommendations may be much more relevant than what any friend has to say, although I have seen that when someone is properly incentivized, they can become very valuable referrers indeed. But whether people listen, depends a lot more on whether tastes are similar rather than closeness in friendship (for more on this, see “Social network collaborative filtering”, a research study by Zheng, Wilkinson and Provost at NYU).

Also, consider if everyone gets access to the same data, there simply will be an over saturation for people being prompted to put things in their feed, as clever marketers will do their analysis, provide incentives, and try to get you to upload anything into your feed. So the social graph is interesting indeed, but may not be the pot of gold many marketers believe it to be, or at least only for a few.

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3 reasons the promise of LBS may be starting to be fulfilled

If you’ve hung around the wireless industry for a while, there have been a few sectors where expectations have been sky high, yet the uptake utterly disappointing. One of these sectors is Location Based Services (LBS). Even markets that have been highly advanced in mobile, such as Scandinavia, have had very few successful services. In Norway, an early LBS called “Buddy” which allowed you to receive alerts when a friend was nearby by Netcom (incumbent mobile operator) was killed by the government. They cited privacy concerns despite the service being opt-in. This was back in 2001, and since then, there arguably have been extremely few success cases outside of an uptake in use of navigation services. I would not call a few million users on Foursquare or Gowalla a success either, as clearly users are in the early adopter/tech geek segment (this writer included) – and it is not yet a mass market service.

 

1. Google combining Places with reviews and Ads
 
First, Google added a recommendation capability to Google Places (the local listing of businesses on google), called Hotpot. This means that when you are out and about, you can easily read reviews for nearby places, and if any of your friends have ranked the place, they will come up first. Sounds like just another Yelp like service? Well, it is – but what makes this powerful is obviously Google’s enormous traffic, the likelihood of Google being the first stop for information for anyone mobile, and the widespread use of Google Ads which businesses are very comfortable with.
 
2. Easy access to context (location) specific information

Google does not stop there, and have added an ability to find out whether a product is in stock at shops near you. Although still in the experimental stage, combined with the above, it is all geared to retailing based on location.

3. Facebook making location a key variable in social
 
Lastly, you cannot ignore the release of Facebook places. While Foursquare may be for the early adopting tech geeks, Facebook’s reach means adding location to your posts or pictures could be come the standard. The goal of checking in will not be to become the mayor, but simply because “where are you doing it” will become as relevant as “what are you up to”.
 
What does this mean for service providers and media companies?
 
 Early reports suggest that LBS will indeed take off (although I am always sceptical to such studies, especially when sponsored by someone who will benefit by the results. Even though JiWire predicts 90% of their tech savvy users will use mobile location based services this holiday season, if you are a retailer or media company, fear not, as it will take some time before this type of use of LBS will indeed be mass market, so there will likely be time to adapt – and the big guys like Facebook and Google are building tools to make it easy for you to take advantage of it.
However, the opportunity is there for innovators to start using location as an advantage. For instance, if you are providing typical location based information such as travel information and reviews, restaurant listings etc. you need to immediately start thinking about your Google/Facebook integration strategy. Few doubt the importance of Facebook connect in terms of viral and mainstream adoption of your services, and Google’s revenue numbers will tell you the power context relevant advertising. If your product/service is based on context relevance, and especially if this product/service is a content type of service, LBS is right here, right now.

  

Posted in The Business of Mobile.

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