Communities Dominate Brands

Birthdays: internet 40 years, PC 35 years, Mobile 30 years, CD Rom 25 years, WWW 20 years

It seems that the years ending in 9 make great moments for inventions, and there are truly massive ones for us to celebrate. But also, there are a number of interesting ones in years that are at the mid-point, ie 25 or 15 or 35 year anniversaries. Lets celebrate in order of age:

Just now, actually literally on 29th of October is the 40th anniversary of the internet, as Professor Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA made the first connection and communication with Stanford Research Institute, connecting the first two 'nodes' of the ARPANET what later became the internet. We celebrate 40 years of the internet, and from those very humble beginnings, at the end of 1969 there were only 4 nodes on this fledgeling global computer network, and today we have over one billion users on the internet. What a ride...  Note that this is quite fast, as previously other billion-user systems took forever to reach that level, the telephone (landline phone obviously) took over 120 years to reach a billion users. Television took over 60 years to achieve that. And the internet did it in a little under 40 years. But its not the only new billion-user system we celebrate today.

Because from 1974 we find the first personal computer. The Altair launched 35 years ago, and yes, the world has also last year passed the point of one billion PCs in use around the world. Wow.

Another milestone, which may be more subtle and treacherous, is that of the pocket computer. While nobody dared to suggest it was one, the first user-programmable pocket calculator, the HP 65 was also launched in 1974, so this, very modest but by all definitions still it was the first pocketable computer - think your iPhone today - traces its history to this year and celebrates 35 years. Star Trek's Spock would be proud...  Obviously we don't have a billion pocketable computing devices, if we define the smartphone as a pocket PC, but will soon achieve that, within a couple of years. So it will soon become yet another billion-user gadget.

Fast forward five years, and we get to 1979. It was first of December 1979, that the world's first commercial cellular automated (and 'modern') mobile telecoms network went live in Tokyo Japan, launched by NTT.ANd yes the mobile phone subscriber count will hit 4.6 billion by the end of the year. We passed a billion users in 2002, so it only took 23 years to hit a billion mobile phones on the planet.

Another massive consumer hit was launched in 1979, also in Japan, when Sony introduced the Walkman. Pocketable music players, initially cassette based Walkmans and clones, then CD players and now MP3 players like the iPod have certainly sold into the far past half billion level, although I do think we are still a way from a billion stand-alone pocketable MP3 players.. Now, if we count all musicphones also into the mix - and why not, many of them are also used as MP3 players - then yes, we shoot past another billion users. Thank you Sony..

And while the music entertainment got a massive new hit product in 1979, so too did the movies and TV industry, but this was a somewhat stillborn solution. Philips and Sony released the first Digital Video Disk system commercially in 1979. You might think that must be the DVD we all have in our homes, but no, this is the predecessor, the giant platters - size of old LP record alums, or bigger than dinner plates - but it was the start of the home video disk player market for movies, and it later spawned the smaller DVD format and another platform that is soon approaching a billion devices in use in most homes that have a TV set.

Now, while the PC is 35 years old today, the 'modern' PC is not. Those early PCs required users to go to take courses just to be able to operate the PCs. The modern PC era was ushered in by the Apple Macintosh, and all modern PCs, Windows based, Linux based and Macintosh based, can trace their user interface and ease-of-use to that ground-breaking personal computer. And yes, the Mac was launched in 1984, so it is 25 years old this year. Thank you Apple ! How many "windows" style PCs are there in use, yes, over a billion.

The really big innovation for the media industries is the digitalization of all content. The mass market solution for that was the music CD, which converted the music industry from analog recording media to the CD format and digital songs. The MP3 market such as the iPod would have been impossble without it, as all songs had to be converted to digital format. When did the CD Rom arrive? Sony and Philips introduced the CD Rom in 1984, so it too is 25 years old, and has passed a billion player devices in use around the planet by now.

Lets skip to 1989, and another technology familiar to all of our readers appears, as Tim Berners-Lee invents the WorldWide Web. Note this is not the same as the internet, even though most users today equate the internet with 'the web' - on the internet you can do a lot of various communication and data activities using the "IP" Internet Protocol. You can do emails, chat, upload and download files using FTP, do voice calls like Skype using Voice over IP, etc. None of these require users to use the WWW web browser, although often the WWW interface is now used. But like the Mac changed the geeky PC to mass markets, so too did the WWW change the internet from geeky nerds to the masses. And yes, we hit a billion users of the web a couple of years ago. But yes, the worldwide web? is 20 years old this year. Happy birthday.

I just spotted a story earlier today on Twitter, that digital advertising is 15 years old, as the first web banner ads appeared in 1984. While technically that was not the first form of digital advertising, as I have written, the fisrt ever ads on the internet were launched earlier that year, when NYNEX in New York had its yellow pages (ads) launched onto the Prodigy proprietary BBS (Bulletin Board System) in January 1984, and then not related to NYNEX, Prodigy became the first of the major BBS providers to open their system to the full internet in February of that year. That was when any internet users on the planet, could access the NYNEX yellow pages ads that had been on Prodigy..  But nonetheless, digital advertising is now 15 years old, and yes, has more than a billion people viewing digital ads (over 2 billion by now, when we add mobile phone ads which are also digital)

I want to add one interesting anniversary here that is not anywhere near a billion users, but will no doubt get there, and that is multiplayer virtual worlds. Like Second Life, Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft, etc. The world's first multi-user virtual environment built into 3D was the Virtual Helsinki project, which was opened to users in 1999, so our virtual worlds are also ten years old. I happened to be close to the Virtual Helsinki project as my former employer Helsinki Telephone Company (now known as Elisa) was a sponsor and technology provider to that project and several of my close colleagues were invoved with it, as I had by then moved on and was employed by Nokia.

And last but by no means least, the mobile internet is 10 years old. Launched by NTT DoCoMo of Japan in 1999, its iconic iMode mobile internet was the first mobile-optimized internet service and spawned countless copies and today counting all the WAP users etc, has over a billion users. That in only ten years.. Domo Arigato, NTT DoCoMo, you have invented the fastest technology to spread to a billion users.

So 40 years for the internet, 35 years for the PC and pocket computers, 30 years for mobile phones and digital video disks as well as the Walkman, 25 years for the Mac and the CD Rom, 20 years for the WorldWide Web, 15 years for digital advertising and 10 years for virtual worlds and the mobile internet. Happy birthday all!

Second Life at 16 million users, says CNN today..

CNN has announced its island on CNN for the i-Report feature. In the soft news story, CNN plugs Second Life and showcases its island. The one bit that struck me as "off the radar" was the user number that Erroll Barnett of CNN reported, saying that Second Life has now 16 million users. I tried to verify that number from other sources but Linden Lab was not very pro-active on its website and press releases and even in a stats package about Second Life. I did find an independent quote from last year saying Second Life had 15 million users, and I have no real reason to doubt CNN, except that this is a dramatic upgrade from the roughly 2 million level we talked about in 2007.

Congratulations Second Life. By its residents, the virtual world is now bigger than the population of all of Portugal or about the size of Sweden and Switzerland put together, or about the size of the Netherlands.. Communities Dominate, eh?

customer insight for effective mobile

If you are a mobile operator, or in fact deal with large customer transactions then you should be interested in a product called Social Links for more information read here

Marketers in the telecom industry are faced with the challenge of ever-changing market conditions that lead to shortage of customer insight, especially in the pre-paid markets. Today at the CTIA wireless show in San Francisco, Xtract announced expanded U.S. availability for its Social Links software, as well as a new module to help mobile operators worldwide better understand their customers in order to deliver more engaging marketing and advertising.

The result is a completely new layer of customer insight and a tangible tool for increasing the efficiency of targeted marketing and advertising.

More on Social Marketing and Social Advertising Intelligence

Thought for the day: We are moving from being materialists, to being digitalists

I spotted a blog at Mindpark by Daniel Nuud, discussing mobile (the blog is in Swedish). He was discussing various evolutions of the analogue world going digital, such as movies and books etc. And Daniel made quite a profound observation, that we are moving from being materialists, to becoming digitalists. His original statement in Swedish was "Vi gar fran materialister till digitalister." (and I hope my weak Swedish was good enough to translate it correctly, ha-ha..). Yes, thinking back, mankind was involved in ever more materialistic pursuits, who had the biggest house, who had the nicest car (or if you're rich, who had the most cars), the nicest plasma screen TV, the nicest clothes, shoes, jewelry, etc etc etc. Materialists.

Now we are entering the digital age, the information age (going from the Networked Age to the Connected Age as we write) and suddenly the materialistic goods start to diminish in value, and it becomes the digital goods that are of value. Then lets look into the near future - as more and more of us are in virtual worlds, whether kids in Habbo Hotel or adults in Second Life or any one of the various gaming worlds like World of Warcraft, Lineage and CounterStrike. In South Korea already more than half of the total population has created an avatar of themselves (have you created your first avatar of yourself? If not, how can you relate to this new emerging world?) The virtual properties start to become ever more important. We report in my newest book, Digital Korea, with Jim O'Reilly, that there are many in South Korea who already spend more on the digital goods for their avatars than they do on their real clothing for themselves. Yes, we as a society are moving from being materialists to being digitalists.

Media - News - Trust - Morality - Ethics and Commerce: Uncomfortable bedfellows

Get your facts straight mate

In 1985, when asked whether news organizations "get the facts straight" or are "often inaccurate," 55 percent chose the former option and 34 percent the latter. This past July, when Pew asked this question, the responses were almost exactly reversed: 39 percent said news media get facts straight and 53 percent said they often don't.

Writes Beth Blanks Hindman Referring to a Pew Research Center findings over several years

1). In 1985, when asked whether news organizations were "moral" or "immoral" in their practices, 54 percent indicated the former, 13 percent the latter, and 33 percent said neither or that they weren't sure. This past July, 46 percent said news media were moral while nearly a third, 32 percent, said immoral.

2). In 1985, when asked whether news organizations "are pretty independent" or are "often influenced by powerful people and organizations," 37 percent chose the former option and 53 percent the latter. That wasn't good for the press then. It's even worse now: In July, 69 percent said news media are often influenced by powerful actors and institutions.

3). Finally, in 1985, when asked whether news organizations "protect democracy" or "hurt democracy," 54 percent chose the former option and 23 percent the latter. In July, only 44 percent said news media protect democracy, while more than a third, 36 percent, said news media hurt democracy.

These trends (and there are more data, none of which shows improving perceptions of the press) are unsustainable for any industry that depends on public support, both philosophically and economically. In decades past, journalism as practiced by newspapers, network and local TV news, and newsmagazines might have been able to turn around these views. But today, with Internet blogs and the loud voices of cable television gaining audiences, what we know as mainstream journalism might simply fade away, seen as increasingly unnecessary.

These trends (and there are more data, none of which shows improving perceptions of the press) are unsustainable for any industry that depends on public support, both philosophically and economically - read Robert McChesney

Trust a word we use so often and then forget its value. Trust is the most precious commodity any brand or business has. Its just in todays world of information empowerment trust must rethought as information travels at the speed of bytes, across time and continents And Reputation: the growing importance of trust in our digital world In the same way mass media obliterates ideas around context and meaning - these are unique and specific - consumers, thats us, all of us have moved beyond the whole notion of assumed positions of authority - information pushed outwards and gratefully accepted. Who in todays worlds as Walter Kronkyte used to say at the end of his broadcast "And thats the way it is". Today, people would be going online to fact check, discuss, argue debate, concur and reflect.

Glen Urban wrote

Evidence is building that the paradigm of marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the past 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment

There will be those happy to shore up the defences and others willing to leap beyond the edge to find a new ledge and new logic and a new way of doing things.

We talk about the Age of Engagement: the ability to find a new way of connecting and communicating, of building trust and advocacy.

The biggest obstacle is legacy organisations, logic and business models that struggle with a new language, metrics etc., as this new ecology cannibalises their existing eco-systems... that is the consequence of structural change.

Imagine you are listed on the stock exchange, you have quarterly reporting, dividends and share price expectations and the CEO realises that his business model is flawed – what does he do? He doesn't sleep nights. Revolutions are always bloody.

But the evidence is there, the work is done, its the execution we are now fighting over.

But returning to the idea of the media and trust, we will seek those out who we believe are credible, believable. We know advertising and commercial marketing objectives drives news organisations in the US, but also elsewhere, its hard to believe the voice of authority if we know other agendas form the words.

Just take this as but one example Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed

Participatory Media to better enable Civic Engagement

Howard Rheingold writes in Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement

Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs (“web logs,” web pages that are regularly updated with links and opinion), wikis (web pages that non-programmers can edit easily), podcasts (digital radio productions distributed through the Internet), and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on “public voice,” should be considered a pillar—not just a component—of twenty-first-century civic curriculum. Participatory media that enable young people to create as well as consume media are popular among high school and college students. Introducing the use of these media in the context of the public sphere is an appropriate intervention for educators because the rhetoric of democratic participation is not necessarily learnable by self-guided point-and-click experimentation. The participatory characteristics of online digital media are described, examples briefly cited, the connection between individual expression and public opinion discussed, and specific exercises for developing a public voice through blogs, wikis, and podcasts are suggested. A companion wiki provides an open-ended collection of resources for educators:

SocialText and Media Literacy

And you can get Howard's first chapter here

In the age of the search engine, the ability to think critically about media sources, their credibility and truth claims are vital for all of us.

The vast repository of information available online has changed forever our certainty about authority.
As such, the locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts has shifted from the publisher to the reader.

So, the ability to be critical, and to ask the right questions is a key skill in terms of media literacy.
However, computer literacy programs in contemporary education have missed out critical thinking from the list of skills being taught to young people.

Critical thinking is, however, regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority, and perhaps not something that belongs in the classroom.

As a consequence, the key literacies required of these digital natives are diverging from the school environment.

Henry Jenkins wrote Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005),more than one-half of all teens have created media content,and roughly one- third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced.In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations,and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter,and feel some degree of social con- nection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).Forms of participatory culture include:

Affiliations — memberships,formal and informal,in online communities centered
around various forms of media,such as Friendster,Facebook,message boards,
metagaming,game clans,or MySpace).

Expressions — producing new creative forms,such as digital sampling, skinning and
modding, fan videomaking,fan fiction writing, zines,mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams,formal and informal,
to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming,spoiling).

Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).

So anyone interested in this area should be following what Howard and Henry have to say.

On this blog and in our book we identified that that the language of our post modern culture can be one of Participation, Collaboration, Co-creation, Group Forming Networks, Authenticity, Trust, and Engagement.

Although starting from a perspective of Marketing Communications we have seen enough material where as Yochai Benkler believes we are living in a Wealth of Networks a notion that is so dramatic that it fundamentally challenges how markets and democracies have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

Today we live in a networked society. Digital information technology, the economics of networked information production and the social practices of networked conversations, qualitatively change the role that individuals can play in cultural and knowledge production and dissemination. Communities are sticky in ways that mass media never was, it requires a very different approach to what we create, how we create it and how we market it.

Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe´ today to speak of “the Internet revolution.” In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Here are out writings on Education And our thoughts on Participation

Public voice and the Digital Native
Public voice is a way to link media skills and civic engagement. Kids in online social network environments are creating publics online in an era when physical public spaces are increasingly denied to them. A significant amount of young people are involved in creating as well as consuming digital media. According to a 2005 survey, the number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24 % in the past four years, and 87% of those are between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. They are anything but passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate and invent ways to participate in cultural production. The internet is not a transformative new technology for them, but a feature of their lives that has always been there, like running water and electricity. This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today's student cohort, there's nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.

Participative media is possibly a powerful tool for helping young people to engage in their own voices about the issues that they care about. The network is more powerful than the node, as someone once told me.

Engagement is about context and meaning. Without context there can be no meaning and therefore no reason to engage.

Virtual worlds collide with hollywood? Habbowood latest from Habbo Hotel and Sulake

We love Habbo Hotel, it is one of the case studies in our book Communities Dominate Brands. Habbo Hotel is available in 32 countries on five continents and has 80 million users worldwide according to latest numbers reported in Animation Magazine of December 2007. Bearing in mind that Second Life had about 2 million users worldwide earlier this year and most of those are in the USA, now note that the childrens virtual playground Habbo Hotel in the USA has 1.7 million USA users. Probably more people in the USA have created an avatar into Habbo Hotel than into Second Life.

But lets look at the latest innovation by Habbo and their owners Sulake of Finland. It is the convergence of virtual worlds with the cinema. Habbo meets Hollywood. Not surprisingly Habbo Hotel calls this Habbowood. Habbowood was launched in September 2007 and allows Habbo users to create short films that are then shown inside Habbo Hotel. The films run about 5 minutes in length and there have already been 3.9 million viewings of Habbowood films and yes, of course, Habbo users can vote for their favourites.

What is Mobile TV? More than TV, beyond just a phone

I've been hanging around television and broadcast folks for the past two weeks - from invited to speak about mobile and TV to the AIB Awards ceremony (AIB is the Association of International Broadcasters) in London last week to delivering the keynote to the Asian Television Forum in Singapore this past week, also about mobile TV.

There is a lot of interest and curiosity about the potential of TV and video content delivered via the mobile phone, and the role of mobile telecoms in broadcast (TV) services. Its a young industry (first TV content shown on mobile phones were launched in Finland as news clip downloads in 2001; and simultaneously MTV in the UK launched the first interactive TV show where viewers could vote by SMS texting) and most concepts tend to be local trials and experiments and pilots. Even the most advanced mobile TV networks and services, such as those currently in South Korea and Japan, are not yet making money on their mass market propositions.

So its still a baby industry, learning to walk before it learns to run. But I think we are getting plenty of good insights into what may become "mobile TV" and how consumers might enjoy that.

First. Lets remember my thesis that mobile is the newest (7th) mass media and is totally different with unique benefits. The mobile can do all that the previous six mass media (print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV and internet) can do. Not all quite as well (watching a movie is not as comfortable as in the cinema or on TV or on a PC screen) but in some cases much better (internet has interactivity but under a billion people worldwide use eMail. On mobile 2 billion people use SMS text messaging and young people all over the world are abandoning eMail in favour of SMS text messaging). If you haven't read Alan Moore's White Paper on 7th Mass Media, I really urge you to do so.

And then lets talk briefly about the CNN news clips on the mobile phone, etc. There are 1.5 billion TV sets in the world; and there are 3.1 billion mobile phones in the world. The total worldwide TV population is growing by about 30-50 million per year. The mobile phone subscription population grew by "only" 400 million this year...  So yes, one part of this mobile-TV convergence is that current existing TV content is repurposed for mobile phones (CNN news clips, Football highlights, music video clips, etc). And equally part of mobile-TV convergence is repurposing existing mobile phone services onto the TV broadcasts, such as American Idol voting, SMS-to-TV chat and 24 hour news shows using user-generated pictures and short video from cameraphones by viewers.

But yes, mobile TV is not "TV on mobile" nor is it "mobile phone (services) on TV". It is a new service, content and programming format opportunity. And by this, the example I used a lot the past two weeks in numerous talks with TV broadcast executives, is the shift from cinema to TV. In the 1930s and 1940s, people would go to the cinema to see long form films (what we'd call Hollywood movies today), and documentaries, and "newsreels" (short news reports from around the world) and "cliffhanger" serials - shorter films run in a long series, where the hero would solve some big problems this week, to get into even bigger trouble towards the end, and face that cliff-hanger, until next week's episode when we'd get to see how our hero managed to get out of trouble (but that episode would end with another cliff-hanger) etc. And for children we had the animation movies from Disney, Looney Tunes etc.

We recognize that documentaries shifted to TV where we have countless documentary channels from the Discovery Channels and History Channels to the BBC factual channels etc. Still occasionally a big blockbuster documentary is shot on film for cinema, like those by Al Gore and Michael Moore for example. The newsreel has totally left the cinema (was cannibalized by nightly TV news in the 1950s) and the cliffhanger movie is a rare exception. Even with most movie series (Bond, Spiderman, Die Hard) the hero solves the problem within the movie rather than leaving the audience to wait for the sequel to finish the story. Rare movie series are designed to feature cliff-hangers but some do still exist (Star Wars, Kill Bill). And again while there are several mostly children-oriented animated movies every year, by far the large majority of childrens animated content is produced for TV.

The point is, that every single movie ever produced for the cinema has been re-purposed for TV, either for broadcast TV or in some cases of extreme violence or adult content etc, then to cable, video cassette or DVD. So of the existing cinema (3rd mass media) formats, all have been repurposed to TV (5th mass media). But these formats do not "sustain" television today. We have a huge appetite for more content, television offers vastly more viewing for mass audiences than cinema. And TV is commercially feasible to deliver such content. Some concepts were adopted from other media (soap operas, sports broadcasts were cannibalized from radio for example)

Consider the innovations that power television today. Talk shows. A daytime staple with the Oprahs and nightly staple with the Lettermans and Lenos. Game shows, from afternoon game shows to big audience prime time shows such as Millionaire and Weakest Link. Music video, the innovation by MTV 25 years ago. Reality TV from Big Brother to American Idol. These television content formats are not sustainable in the cinema !  You cannot charge people 50 cents, rush them into the cinema seats, to show them one music video by Madonna of 3 minutes, then hussle them all out of the theatre as the next audience is about to come in to watch the next 3 minute video by 50 cent, etc. Same for Big Brother. It works on TV, we would not walk into the cinema several times per day when the House is running, to snack at bits of what is happening in the reality show.

So here is my point. ALL existing cinema content that had been invented by the 1950s when TV appeared commerically, also was shown on TV. In some cases TV absorbed (and often improved) that concept; in other cases cinema was very resilient in retaining a given content format (the Hollywood blockbuster movie for example). But MOST hit programming on TV was invented for TV. Even though we have "moving pictures" with colour and sound on cinema, and nothing stops us from showing a music video or American Idol episode in the cinema, that media is not economically viable for those formats.

Yes, this is another long posting, sorry about that. I'm a bit tired here at the airport waiting to get home, but wanted to get this blog entry done.

So then. Lets take our lesson. Since TV as an industry is massively bigger than cinema, and regularly every bit of cinema content will also be used as part of the content for TV, but most of TV content was invented for that mass media channel, then this is very likely going to also happen on "mobile TV".

So yes, its very likely that ALL existing television content will be repurposed for mobile phone consumption. But new innovation is now required to invent those parallels of what talk shows, game shows, music videos and reality TV became to be in terms of viewerships and revenues for television.

Where do we go? Well, one interesting twist is that fave story of mine, Pop Kids, by Ex Machina in the Netherlands. Merging American Idol style pop singer contest reality TV, with online multiplayer virtual reality worlds of broadband internet (like Second Life and Habbo Hotel) with the user-generated power inherent in the mobile phone. So pairs of "parents" generate their avatar, the Pop Kid, which is built out of the "DNA" of the phones of their parents (what is on my music playlist, converging with that of the other phone etc). Then just like with the tamagotchi, the "parents" have to nurture and train the Pop Kid to grow and eventually enter into a contest against other avatar-based virtual pop idol kids.

At the Asian Television Forum we heard many ideas of where this mobile TV idea might evolve. One of the exciting ideas we heard from a few of the panelists talking about Japan and Spain, was the idea of audience participation in the plot development of a series, as we've also reported here at this blogsite before. Another is the convergence of multiplayer online gaming with television like Kart Rider in South Korea. And yet another is the migration of the CNN News Ticker style of breaking news channel to the idle screen of the mobile phone. I've talked about this a lot, after it was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo as iMedia two years ago. Since then similar idle screen news scrollers have been introduced around the world from Vodafone in Portugal to M1 in Singapore. This is quite an alarming development for the newsmedia (especially 24 hour news broadcasters) as it might do to 24 hour TV news what the internet is now doing for the daily newspaper in all parts of the industrialized world. The Finnish daily business newspaper, Taloussanomat, is probably the first major national newspaper to quit because of online (and mobile) cannibalization. The last print edition of Taloussanomat will be printed one month from now, on 31st of December 2007.

The phone is both the control point for convergence, and the pervasive (near-ubiquitous) media channel. Yes, the screen is tiny compared to our plasma screen TV, but the phone is with us at all times. And young people do not mind squinting at small screens for long times like the Sony Playstation Portable.

Mobile TV will allow access to the power of customer identity only available on mobile telecoms networks (on fixed landline phones anyone can answer or initiate calls on a given phone, the father, the mother, the son or the daughter, but on mobile phones they are our own; 63% of married adults do not even share their phone with their spouce according to Wired).

Perhaps most importantly, the advertising industry will learn a new way of doing advertising when they develop advertising formats and concepts for mobile TV. On all traditional TV formats (broadcast, cable, satellite etc) if there is advertising, it is currently embedded into the linear consumption of the content. We cut the show for an advertising break, or we force to watch an ad before we show the content etc.

On mobile (and mobile TV) we can remove the artificial linkage between consuming ads and consuming content. Blyk is showing us radical new ways to make advertising appealing to the target audiences, to the point where we can safely remove the linear programming link. So we could have for example a couple of ads to view when we feel like it, and we can watch the movie without a break.

So while yes, probably all current TV concepts will appear in some forms or another, what will have to happen is that we invent now, "better" or at least "different" formats for "mobile TV" - formats which are not even feasible on current broadcast/cable TV. That is what I call mobile TV. And Alan and I will keep our attention very closely to all developments in this area and will bring them to you on this blogsite.

And finally, anyone interested in mobile TV, I've just released my latest Thought Piece about it (a 2 page intense short version of a white paper). If you'd like it, don't leave me a comment asking for it here at the blog, but write directly to me at   tomi  at   tomiahonen  dot  com.  I'll send you the Thought Piece in return, for free of course. Obviously mobile TV is also a chapter in my brand new book, Digital Korea for those very serious about the topic who want to read more about it.

The 4C's for Business in the virtual world

IN our book we describe the 4C's of Commerce - Culture - Community & Connectivity.

And here we have an example of business awaking to those possibilities

Where people congregate, business is usually never far behind and as an increasing number of internet users explore the opportunities for social interaction, play and even money-making provided by online virtual worlds, business is getting in on the act.

Whether it is by using environments such as Second Life to sell digital versions of real-world goods, setting up branded worlds to increase customer loyalty or using private online universes to communicate better with their own employees, companies are experimenting with alternative digital realities.

And

Although Second Life is the flag-bearer of virtual worlds, there are dozens out there with millions of users signed up. They cater for everyone from hardened gamers to children taking their first web steps.

World of Warcraft took the concept behind the Dungeons & Dragons games of the 1980s onto the web and 8.5 million players have followed. RuneScape, created by two British brothers, serves a similar fantasy market. Science fiction fans have Entropia Universe which, like Second Life, has a fully fledged economy with its own cash system.

And that is right Second life however is dwarfed by World of Warcraft. Though a veteran gaming insider says that WoW just has executed much much better than many of its rivals.

And to be honest there is something far more profound going on. In Living in the wealth of networks and technologies of co-operation we looked at recruitment and how companies are using virtual worlds, connectivity and creation to understand its future empoyees better or Nature Network which like Siphs which levearge the knowledge of a peer group for the benefit of the individual and the interested community.

Opening embassy in Second Life? Sweden and Maldives already there

This took me by surprise. Alan and I write a lot about virtual reality - we have a chapter on it in the book Communities Dominate Brands and the childrens virtual playground Habbo Hotel is one of our case studies in the book. So we celebrate the growing importance of various elements around MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) avatars and various virtual worlds. But a news item on CNN just a moment ago had me paying attention. Sweden launching an embassy into Second Life?

And a quick search of related news finds that Sweden isn't even the first real country to set an official representation inside Second Life. The island nation of Maldives opened their embassy a few days before Sweden did. So yes, virtual worlds are converging very rapidly with the real world. For more on these embassies see this story Sweden and Maldives embassies in Second Life.