Communities Dominate Brands

How to piss off your customers in a Tesco stylee

Davide Cushman at FasterFuture blog spot gives us a real example of how not to talk to your customers and how not to use data within a marketing context.

welcome to Tescopoly

A friend of mine recently received a polite but threatening letter from Tesco because she had parked in the car park at their aircraft-hangar-of-a-superstore at Barhill, near Cambridge, for more than the time Tesco had calculated it was reasonable to shop (I think their limit was/is 4 hours).

This is a car park that's shared with other retailers, by the way.

Let's think about that for a moment. Tesco used a camera to record her arrival and departure from this car park, a camera with numberplate recognition - and one which is presumably connected to a computer which can both generate nasty automated letters AND find your home address, based only on your registration number, to send the nasty letter to.

Did you know Tesco had the right to your address simply because you choose to drive into their car park? Neither did I.

Such Big Brother tactics are somewhat predictable and depressing, talking of depression did you also know that people are more depressed shopping in Tesco than any other retail store in the UK?

Lessons from the first TV ad run in 1941 in America

Our friend Russell Buckley of Admob who blogs at MobHappy, made a great point about advertising in a new media, in his posting about TV like its 1941. In 1941 when the first ad ran in America on TV (interrupting a baseball game broadcast on TV), it was a clumsy attempt to add sound to a fixed print ad (but no movement ie video on the TV ad). It took a lot of creativity for the TV industry to get past just copying existing print (and radio) ads and using the power of TV for far more compelling advertising. Obviously today in advertising on the internet, and even more so on mobile, there is a similar need to move past copying old media formats, and learning to use the full power of the newer media channel and its unique powers. Great posting by Russel - with a picture of the first TV ad, worth reading.

Faust, Banking and Trust

Over the few weeks we have watched an entire industry - implode. Running parallel to that I have been working on a number of presentations and projects in which I have been thinking through a set of principals that I describe as Flow(s).

As component parts to Flow(s) are concepts of [1] Trust [2] Transparency & Transparency of contract [3] The 4C's of Commerce, Culture, Community, Connectivity.

Here my interest is in Commerce and Community.

Last year as bonus's were paid out to city dealers of up to 20 million pounds, many attacked the ethics of such large bonus's. That even the notion of regulation in the free market economy was sacrilegious.

As Will Hutton writes

the scale of the personal rewards now available in London and Wall Street - £15m-£20m at the top is the norm - along with the greed-is-good doctrine associated with extreme laissez-faire economics, has trashed the need for individuals to worry about integrity. They don't need to be concerned about their reputations; they just need one deal or one year at the top and they need never work again. The incentive structure has so departed from one of the principal norms of fairness - proportionality between value added and reward - that it has eviscerated trust relationships and integrity.

Yet how ironic then that it is the everyday Joe and Joesphine that has been asked to put their hand in their pocket and bail out a defunct system - in the same breath that their homes and livelihood's have been taken from them. Hank Paulson the former Goldman Sachs CEO, who is involved with the $700 billion rescue plan, is described by Hutton as not being well endowed with the fairness gene.

his original plan was designed to bail out the system intact. It made no demands that any financial executives sacrifice pay or bonuses despite having driven their firms and wider economy to the point of bankruptcy. He does not want the government to provide new bank capital to help recapitalise a bust banking system. Instead, he wants the government to buy their toxic debt and so leave the banks unreformed. On top he wanted complete discretion to act as he chose without any oversight.

Excuse me? And in fact I think that we are not even at the bottom of ths crisis, as the Bradford & Bingley in the UK is the latest to fall victim.

Hutton underscores the critical point when he writes

... it is a crisis of a particular capitalism that has set aside respect for trust, integrity and fairness as fuddy-duddy obstacles to 'wealth generation'. What we are relearning is that without trust and fairness, capitalism risks its own sustainability, even while it unleashes forces that undermine those self-same values.

We have separated Commerce from Community and Accountability. We work to quarterly profits and goals, and we have been mining at the edifice of our own civilisation as a consequence. John Reynolds argues that banks will need to move to a system of genuine ethical scrutiny. The Archbishop of Canterbury criticised the

trading of the debts of others without accountability

Adam Smith argued that human-self interest drives markets to a form of equilibrium, where the result would be the best possible outcome for society itself.

Well, I think we can see that this is not the case, when greed and avarice dominate the agenda. when in fact we trade in peoples lives as a game of risk. The implications and reveberations will be defining - beyond the banking industry.

Adam Smith also asked this question, what determines how wealth and resources are allocated in a society? I think we need to be asking this question again today, because it seems to me that the economic models, and wealth creation schemes have lost all sense of reality with the real world.

Trust - the foundation of all collaboration and sustainable trade has left the banking industry. Commerce and commerce alone does not make for a sustainable society and or economy. Especially if John Gray, is to be believed

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

The visceral truth of Schumpeters concept of the gales of creative destruction, is measured in the words of Grays comment,

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects

Gray attacks the Amercian political elite for being the architects, and harbingers of their current downfall. Deregulation, and libertarian economics, starting with Thatcher and Reaganomics, tore asunder the controls set on free markets. And indeed we see a prancing John McCain trying to make political capital out of a crisis I think he barely understands the magnitude of.

My question is what type of society do we want? And how is that sustainable? We are witness to the last gasp of a mass consumer society where we worship above all else money. We are all more than that, we always have been. But this endless seperation of ; Commerce + Community, Ethics, Sustainability, Happiness, Spirituality even - leaves us all bankrupt.

That is why there is  a shift in ambition away from consumerism and city life, even as the credit crunch takes hold, for the first time in generations more people more people are moving to rural areas that are moving out of them.

And Faust? Well making a pact with the devil never works out in the end.

Engagement Marketing BMW style: MMS ads to sell winter tyres

This is certainly one of the best examples of a clever engagement marketing campaign this year. It is an MMS campaign, by BMW, in Germany. It was tightly targeted, timed, personalized - and yes - this was text-book engagement marketing. The story is covered in the new issue of MobiAd News and features part 2 of the interview of my friend Marc Mielau, the innovation manager for mobile marketing at BMW.

Here is how it worked. German winters require snow tyres. So if you bought a car in the summer months, you would have summer tyres on the car, and would need winter tyres. BMW had the required info on their recent customers, what car model, what wheel types, and could therefore figure out which winter tyre model would fit the car of any given customer. Best of all, they had the mobile phone numbers. Obviously BMW focused only on those cars that were sold that year between spring and autumn, because if the owner had had the BMW for more than a year, the owner would have bought winter tyres last year, for last winter..

So BMW designed an MMS campaign, where they customized the picture of the car to be the model of the car that the customer had, and the colour of the car, with the wheel rims that the customer had bought. Then BMW virtually fitted the suggested winter tyre for that car and wheel. And this image was to be sent to the customer.

So when do you buy winter tyres. Not when its the summer. But when it really starts to feel like winter. Because this was mobile, BMW had prepared the campaign, and waited for the exact right moment. The day the first snow started to fall in Germany, that was when the MMS messages went out.

And best of all, the MMS message included a link to come to BMW's mobile website, to select alternate tyres (and wheel rims) to upload to the tyre simulator, so that the customer could experiment with other variations and see their prices and compare.

How did it do? A conversion rate from messages sent, to actual tyre purchases made at registered BMW dealers, of 30%...   Excellent !!!   This is the future. Mobile marketing works in any industry, not only in selling ringing tones or voting for American Idol..   (and do remember, I have a Thought Piece for you on mobile advertising, if you want more examples. The 2 page document is not too long that any exec can find time to read it, but packed with stats and examples. Send me an email to  tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com and I'll send you the Thought Piece.

Why lack of cellphone polling is creating bias in US Presidential polls

There is an interesting analysis of polling methodology by the Pew organization in America. Yeah, I know, if the reader of our blog is not deeply into American presidential politics, then polling (statistics) can be very boring. Even more boring is to discuss the market research methodology for all who are not stats-nuts like me, ha-ha.. But this is actually quite relevant and illustrates a growing discrepancy between the old way and the new way, and does apply to most media markets etc.

So, the basic premise of Pew's article by Keeter, Dimock and Christian at Pew, yesterday 23 Sept and entitled Cellphones and the 2008 Vote, is that if a telephone-interview based presidential poll has been conducted without cellphone polling (ie done only on fixed landline phones), it distorts the results. Their analysis of their own data, over several polls, finds that a balanced fixed landline and cellphone based poll, will add approximately 2 percentage points to Obama's advantage than a poll that is done using only landline phones. If this finding is true, it would help explain why some polls rather consistently in this year, have had an approx 2 point variance in their findings, when Obama had his bounce after the Democratic convention, or when McCain gained his two bounces, one with the announcement of Gov Palin as his VP, and then the Republican convention bounce; in various repeating national surveys, there has been a rather consistent 2 point difference.
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So, Mr Two Mobile Phones, what's going on?  Good question. Pew is right and their statistical analysis of this "anomaly" has very sound sociological reasons. And they are reflective of an increasing bias between these two methodologies in conducting polls.

So in 2004, at the last Presidential election in America, the American cellphone penetration had just passed 50% per capita, and was still well below the fixed landline phone penetration. Essentially almost every cellphone owner would also have a fixed landline. Cellphones were just shifting from being executive "toys" to being mass market telecoms tools. There was an age (and sex) bias in cellphones, with employed adults having the majority of cellphones, and it was still a rich white man's tool, spreading beyond that user base.

Fast forward to 2008. Today American cellphone penetration rate is nearing 90%. There are more cellphones than fixed landlines. And most importantly, over 15% of Americans have "cut the cord" ie their households have no fixed landline, but have only a cellphone. This is not a USA-specific trend, all of these trends are global trends, reported in my books and on this blog for years, and were first observed in Finland and Scandinavia ten years ago.

This trend - of a cellphone-only household, is the first significant factor that causes bias in this year's election polling. It is not spread universally. Older people tend to have steady homes, often owning their homes and have had fixed landlines installed decades ago and keep their phones. Why not.

Younger people, especially first time employed, are often moving from one address to another, in search of jobs, and often move homes as they meet up with partners, and move out when then split up, then move in again when they get married, start families, move to larger homes for their kids, etc. This nomadic behaviour typically starts with American youth when they go to college, and will continue for years, until they perhaps settle down when they start to raise kids. Every time a young adult moves from one address to the next, there is the issue of deciding, do they still want to install a fixed landline phone at the next home. And since every American has a cellphone (90% penetration rate means its mostly pre-teen children and some very elderly, who are no longer without a cellphone), when you move to a new address, the cellphone will work fine (in most cases, most locations, in cities, with the caveats that American cellular networks do not all cover the full country and their network coverage is incredibly bad and patchy, compared to more advanced telecoms markets in Europe, Asia and Australia)

So if you are a pollster, and your polling system targets only fixed landline phones, you will miss out on all of these who are very economically viable, have a cellphone, but have decided no longer to maintain a fixed landline phone connection to the home.

Is that relevant? In some elections there is not a significant age split in support. It would then not matter. But this time, Republican Senator McCain, who is 72 years old, has his base of support with those over the age of 65, and Democratic Senator Obama, who is 47 years old, has his base of support with those under the age of 40.

Just on this factor, any pollster who does not sample the cellphone owning population, will be avoiding a significant part of Obama's main support base.

Lets dig a bit deeper. Perhaps a young voting-aged US adult who does have a landline phone, would behave and hold similar values to the similarly aged adult who only uses a cellphone. Maybe while there is an age based difference, perhaps there is no significant impact to presidential preference this year?

One of Obama's other key constituents is the university student age population. He had a consistent advantage in the primaries against Hillary Clinton in all college towns in America. Remember the thought, that Americans often leave home when they go to study at university. But not all go to university. Who doesn't? There are some who cannot afford to study. Then there are those with very poor academic results, and can't get into college. And finally, there are those who have found their career or life choice which does not require college - whether perhaps being a farmer or following into a parent's job say at a small factory etc; or perhaps especially for some young women, finding the husband and getting married and not wanting to go to college.

Many of these, who do not go to college, would then be likely to stay at home in the home of their parents.

So if the pollster is looking for young adults (to fit a nationally representative sample) and uses only fixed landline phones, that pollster will hit particularly heavily those young adults who still live with their parents.

They would severely under-represent college aged (not living with parents) young adults.

This I think is a very solid reason why not only age matters this year, but the college-educated sector of the youth (about half of American high school graduates do continue onto college, so this is a large sector of American voting age young adults)

But there is also a more profound impact this year. It is social networking (can you say "Communities Dominate" ha-ha). Senator Obama has used all forms of social networking and digital communication methods, from MySpace and Facebook to Twitter and SMS - remember his announcement of VP choice by SMS text message last month.

Among those who are active in digital social networks, Obama has a huge advantage in support. He has consistently led in building social networks and various methods on them for his campaign and those young Americans who are active in the social networking space, are particularly attracted to Obama, not only for his methods of speaking to them (and for being young and hip and different); but also for promoting consistently issues that appeal to young voters, college loans and programmes, green values, new jobs, etc etc etc.

Now how do these digitally hyperactive young adults correspond with cutting the cord in the home? Of course there is very strong overlap. There are plenty of heavily social networked young adults who have landlines - but more often than not, they use those only for broadband internet access, and if they need a landline type of phone service, will then use Skype for example.

So now, in this year's election, the most active of Senator Obama's supporters will fit the "cellphone only" phone population very strongly, and any pollster interviewing only fixed landline telephone based voters, will miss out on a disproportionate part of these hard-core Obama supporters.

Remember the big picture. At the end of last year, already 15% of all American households with telephone connection, had no fixed landline at all. But very reasonably, these are predominantly young and employed or young and in college, and thus very strongly leaning to support Obama. And the trend to more Americans cutting the cord has been growing at 2% per year, according to the CTIA. So its very likely 17% today.

This means that it is very likely, that those pollsters who use only fixed landline based interviews, will be creating a systematic bias in their finding in favour of Senator McCain and against Senator Obama. The Pew article suggested it would be in the order of 2%. My quick analysis on the USA age pyramid and a very crude model of likely voters (older people vote more reliably than young people), and I find the same order of magnitude.

Now, what this means is two things. Those who report on polls, should ask for a clarification on cellphone interviews. And those who conduct polls, please consider very carefully your methodology. 2% is a giant error when the national polls suggest the difference is about that, 2%, nationally. Using the wrong method would easily result in the pollster going from being totally right, to totally wrong, in predicting the actual election.

The battle for America's soul - Palin vs. Obama

Jonathan Freedland's - thought piece in the Guardian, had a profound effect on me.

Articulate and I believe not partisan it (Freedland's piece) outlines how many of us in the West feel about the state of the Union. But this election sadly does not allow us to vote :-( As the result would be a landslide for a black man called Obama.

You fear for America with the hockey mum whose actually describes herself as an attack dog. Especially with her credentials

We know one of Palin's first acts as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska was to ask the librarian the procedure for banning books. Oh, but that was a "rhetorical" question, says the McCain-Palin campaign. We know Palin is not telling the truth when she says she was against the notorious $400m "Bridge to Nowhere" project in Alaska - in fact, she campaigned for it - but she keeps repeating the claim anyway. She denounces the dipping of snouts in the Washington trough - but hired costly lobbyists to make sure Alaska got a bigger helping of federal dollars than any other state.

She claims to be a fiscal conservative, but left Wasilla saddled with debts it had never had before. She even seems to have claimed "per diem" allowances - taxpayers' money meant for out-of-town travel - when she was staying in her own house.

And Freedland skips the point that Palin believes women's bodies are not their own. Or that politics does not really matter or anything else in fact if...

we are not right with God

But surely the American constitution means everyone has a choice Ms Palin?

blogger Andrew Sullivan (writes Freedland) calls Palin a "Christianist" - seeking to politicise Christianity the way Islamists politicise Islam - could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

And that's the point as we move into a world where the old order economically and therefore politically is evolving America, instead of being so utterly insular, must reflect on what role it wants to play in the world. But that too is a complete paradox. For most Americans they have no idea (sorry) of their importance on the global stage.

And as Jared Diamond points out in Guns Germs and Steel, civilisations do not last forever, ever.

McCain could be America's precipitous leader down that path

The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him (Obama) in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

 

Cross-over points coming this year in media numbers

We look at all types of digital and interactive media here at Communities Dominate, but as my particular experience is the business and numbers of the newest of the seven mass media (ie mobile), I occasionally discuss those numbers, as they can be quite startling to many of our readers.


UDATE Dec 10 - I've just published my annual statistical review about the overall size of the mobile industry for end-of-year 2008. All new numbers so if you are interested in the "big picture", you may want to read this blog entitled Trillion with a T: Newest Giant Industry is Mobile


This year once again we will be seeing several significant cross-over points as mobile overtakes other major technologies and mass media channels.

And for those not very familiar with mobile as the 7th mass media channel - how is it even possible to reach the numbers I'll talk about, note that the world has passed 3.6 billion mobile phone subscribers as of the first half of 2008 (we'll be just about 4 billion at the end of this year). So what we're looking at is a monster-sized industry and even a billion users out of all mobile subscribers is only less than one in three.. So lets dig in..

We reported earlier that Informa has come out with 2008 numbers for the industry total revenues. They reported that mobile data services, excluding SMS text messages, will be worth 70 Billion dollars this year. For some media context, thats slightly larger than the global book publishing industry, or roughly as much as Hollywood box office revenues, global music industry revenues, and videogaming software sales, put together. Just ten years ago this industry (mobile data, excluding SMS text messages) had zero dollars in revenues.

This year we'll see sales of 300 million multimedia phones, says Rider Research. A multimedia phone has a camera, a colour screen, and a media player ie music and/or video player. That is a big number, yes. Bear in mind since 2001 when the iPod was introduced, Apple has sold about 200 million total iPods (media players, mostly music players obviously but also video players). And this year the phone industry sells 300 million phones that are multimedia capable. What a business, eh? Or to put it in another way, this year more multimedia phones are sold than TV sets; or more multimedia phones than laptop PCs.. Yes, its a big industry indeed.

Talking about TV. There are about 1.4 billion TV sets in the world. But this should get the TV advertising people to pay attention. This year there will be 1.5 billion people who will receive advertising on their phones according Juniper Research. And against the total mobile subscriber base, that is obviously only a little more than 4 in 10 phone owners who will receive ads. More than half of the population in countries as diverse as Japan and Spain already do so. Yes, 2008 is definitely the year to boost interest in mobile advertising.

Picture messaging, often known by its techno-babble cryptic name of MMS (Multimedia Messaging System) ie the ability to send your picture from your cameraphone to any other modern phone (ha-ha, well, except for some bizarre reason the iPhone, the only smartphone that is not compatible with the global picture messaging standard) is nearing a major milestone. This number is hard to find, but my company TomiAhonen Consulting tracks moble industry numbers and we're very fast approaching a major milestone, which I'm sure will then be reported by the major analysts. We have passed a billion active users of picture messaging, but the point is, we'll pass 1.2 billion users of MMS picture messaging. Why is 1.2 billion a relevant number? Because that is the level of usage of the second most popular data application on the planet (email; SMS text messaging is obviously the most popular by a massive margin, with over 2.5 B users). Yes, probably near the end of this year, or else early next year, there will be more users of mobile phones sending picture messages, than there are active email users..

Then we have those mystic 3G phones and subscribers. 3G was once accused by many so-called telecoms experts (who mostly came from the fixed landline side of telecoms, or else from backward countries like the USA) who argued that the 100 billion dollars that was spent on 3G licences in 2000-2001 would never be paid back, and would bankrupt the industry. They hadn't done their math. As I argued back then - and in my book M-Profits, the industry was set to earn those license fees back well before this decade was done. Well, this year there are 362 million customers with 3G phones and 3G services on 3G networks. They will generate over 250 billion dollars of service revenues just this year alone. As the industry sustains over 35% profit margins (EBITDA profit margins for the accountants out there) - assuming even only modest growth for the future, the 100 billion can be paid off in the next 12 months, out of the profits earned by the industry.. This is a big big industry with big big numbers. We don't talk millions in mobile, we talk billions.

And of those billions, the total value of the PC based internet, including all service revenues, all advertising revenues, and all monthly subscription fees including broadband and dial-up, globally, was 177 billion dollars in 2007 according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers. I don't have their number for 2008, but it will be very close to 200 billion, in round terms. Guess what. Mobile data revenues (not counting the costs of mobile subscription fees, just the data revenues) are worth 200 billion dollars this year according to Informa. So we are now reaching the point, where the little brother, mobile as the 7th mass media channel, is going to pass in size the sixth mass media channel, the internet, in total revenues. A major milestone indeed. The biggest engine of that income in mobile is SMS text messaging, which will deliver over 130 billion dollars to the industry this year. Yes, you read that right. SMS alone is larger than global newspaper advertising revenues of $120 B, for example, and almost as large as the global soft drinks industry of $145 B. Think about that when you reach for your next Pepsi..

We are past 3.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world. Even the poorest continent, Africa stands at 34% mobile phone penetration per-capita. Every economically viable person on the planet has a phone, and can be reached with SMS text messaging. And the industry keeps selling a massive number of new phones. This year we'll sell over 1.2 billion new phones and over 190 million of those will be smartphones says Gartner. Will those be those Apple iPhones? Actually Gartner's latest quarterly data has five brands of smartphones outselling Apple, with RIM's Blackberries outselling iPhones 5 to 1, and Nokia smartphones of course being the giant of the handset business, outselling iPhones 15 to 1..

Finally we are approaching the tipping point for the mobile internet. Here there are vast differences in definitions and what is counted and what is reported. Briefly, it is possible to measure access of the "real internet" ie the 6th Mass Medium by using a mobile phone or for example a 3G data card or 3.5G USB dongle and a laptop. By this use there are only some hundreds of millions of internet users accessing from mobile, and a small fraction of all internet users (of over 1.3 billion).

But then there is what is called a "mobile internet" which could be said to be synonymous with WAP and other such mobile browser environments like iMode etc. By this count there are nearly a billion mobile internet users. Then there is a definition of internet content, being accessed by mobile. So downloading a mobile game, over the air, would count as this, or downloading a song to a musicphone. If counting mobile data downloading and browsing, we are well past a billion users, probably near the 1.3 billion internet user number in 2008.

Which brings me to those internet user numbers. Note that out of 1.3 billion internet users, there are only 950 million personal computers (desktop and laptops combined) in use. So we already have a discrepancy of 350 million who access the internet without a PC. Most of those will be accessing via mobile. Mobile access to the internet is the majority in many countries around the world including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India and South Africa; with many European countries nearing the half-way point this year.

My point is, that we are at a cross-roads also for internet access, and internet service access by mobile or PC. There are many services which report more access from mobile devices than PCs, and the internet weather service websites were among the first to report this two years ago.

Also - please do note, that most users will have access to both (say you have a Blackberry but also access your email on a laptop at work; or you have both a Mac and an iPhone, etc). Most users in the develped world who can afford the mobile internet (and a suitable phone) will have both means to access the web, and use both. But in the developing world there is a far greater need for just one device. The smartphone, while expensive, is a far easier option for budget-constrained youth at university or in a first time job, than buying a laptop. When forced to have only one, it will increasingly be a mobile internet enabled phone. But worldwide, this year, we'll probably be at a one third/one third/one third split. One third who access exclusively by PC; one third who access exclusively by phone; and the last third, who access by both PC and phone.

So keep your eyes on these numbers and really, if you don't have a mobile strategy and have a professional interest to read our blog, why not? Can you remain viable for long without a mobile strategy anymore?

For those who would like to understand the industry more, remember I have my free Thought Piece on Mobile Industry Size 2008, which I am happy to email to you. Send me a request to  tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com. In return I will include as a bonus, the 30 page excerpt from my brand new book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, which will appear on Amazon shortly (the publisher is already taking orders at their website)

UDATE Dec 10 - I've just published my annual statistical review about the overall size of the mobile industry for end-of-year 2008. All new numbers so if you are interested in the "big picture", you may want to read this blog entitled Trillion with a T: Newest Giant Industry is Mobile

Fascinating, Captain, fascinating.. as Spock might say of the smartphone today

I am obviously also a big fan of science fiction and have occasionally returned to famous themes from science fiction that have become fact, in my books and here with Alan on this blog. Our friend Faith McGary of Infonxx (which is now renamed and called KGB) the phone information providers ie 118118 in the UK etc, posted a funny comment at Forum Oxford last week, that had me thinking.

So, lets go back to the late 1960s. The first serious science fiction TV show is on the air in America, Star Trek (the original series). It ran three seasons only and was cancelled due to poor ratings (but has had a remarkably long career in reruns and syndication globally, ever since; not to mention spawning 4 follow-up TV series each longer than the original - rare for a spin-off to outlast the original - and also a lucrative movie franchise).

But yes, back to the 1960s. Star Trek popularized many science fiction concepts that are quite common today in most Sci Fi stories, from hyperspace drives allowing spaceships to travel faster than the speed of light, to teleportation, a handy way to move TV actors from the orbiting spaceship to the planet of the week down below, without very expensive special effects of shuttle crafts landing on the planet..

But yes, then there were the three standard gadgets that Captain Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty would carry on their missions to the uncharted planets. They would typically carry three technologies, the phaser guns, the communicators, and usually only one of them - likely to be Spock - would carry the most complex portable gadget they had, the Tri-Corder.

I was always fascinated by that device. Three functionalities, it was the recorder-computer-scanner. And by scan, please don't limit yourself to thiking today's PC industry flatbed scanners, remember that the Star Trek ship had long distance scanner arrays - to scan planets for lifeforms, etc. So when thinking scannner, think camera, X-Ray etc. Not just flatbed scanner..

And this portable, not quite pocketable device was a combination of recording (cool), computing (very cool) and scanning (ultra-cool).

Lets put it in context of 1960s technology. The cassette tape recorder was just being invented by Philips. So most people who would have any kind of mechanical recorder, could only record voice, onto open reel tape recorders. The most portable ones at the time were the size of a small shoe-box. The Star Trek Tri-Corder was smaller than that.

In the 1960s there was no mass market video recording. The first home VCR would appear five years later launched by Philips in Europe, in a machine more expensive than the largest colour TVs and in size they were - I am having a hard time to imagine anything in modern life that is of the size of that first Philips VCR. Don't think of the oldest Betamax or VHS recorders, this was even bigger. The video cassette alone was a huge bulky thing as thick as 4 DVD cases..  now I know, a suit case! Yes, that first video recorder was literally the size of a small suitcase, you know the size, larger than a briefcase. The largest size small suitcase you can get onboard an airplane. THAT big. That was the first mass market video recorder in the summer of 1972, released in Europe a couple of years before Sony rolled out its Betamax in Japan and globally.

And this Star Trek Tri-Corder would do recordings. Not just voice but also video. And wait - that first Philips VCR has no camera, only the recorder part. The Star Trek Tri-Corder also included the sensor (scanner) to capture images and video. Wait a moment. There were no portable video cameras for us in the 1960s. Video cameras were enormous robot-like gadgets on heavy wheeled dollies, used only indoors in studios. The first ikegami and Sony and Panasonic shoulder-portable professional video cameras were starting to emerge in the 1970s, and cost - literally - a million dollars per unit.

Today pocketable video recording is nothing amazing, as any cheap cameraphone includes picture and video recording ability (well, most of them except the iPhone ha-ha). But in the 1960s, this was a "magical" invention. FAR beyond what was on the production line of any electronics maker. Remember there were no digital cameras. So 1960s camera technology was film based cameras, and a Polaroid was the best you could hope for in (near-)instant photography.

The Tri-Corder also had an enormous capacity to store information (recorder) as in memory and storage on a computer today. We didn't really see much the limits of how much of this capacity was assumed into the Star Trek device, but it was a lot.

Then the second ability, the computer. I was lucky to see a real computer in person when one of my relatives took me to see one, as an 11-year old. A real computer. It was enormous, filled two rooms. It was running, but there were no lights. It was processing a programme that would run all day and night. I was very disappointed that it was so silent and there was nothing exciting about it. Some big tape wheels would occasionally hum to action, roll a bit, and stop. Nothing else. And the room was chilly, as the air conditioning kept the room at very low temperature. This was 1971, still the time when computers were literally programmed using punch cards..  Oh, this was one of the most powerful computers in Finland at the time..

So, Star Trek was made years before this level, and a combination device had managed to squeeze a computer into that portable casing. Regular readers of our blog know that a modern mobile phone is a very advanced computer. To put it in context. The cheap mobile phone today is more powerful than the world's most powerful computer in the time of Star Trek. And more amazingly, any one standard smartphone today, is more powerful than - all the computers of the world, in the 1960s, put together..  If you have an N-Series or iPhone or Blackberry etc, in your pocket is more computing power than all computers of the world, in the 1960s, put together.

Fascinating, as Mr Spock would say..

Now to the last part, the scanner ability of the Tri-Corder. I mentioned video scanning and image scanning. Fine. Any cheap digital camera can do that. But also, the modern phone has a voice sensor. We can capture voices and real-time soundtracks to videos. Again for context, when outdoor film crews would shoot for TV shows in the 1960s, they had separate film cameras, and separate sound recorders. These were then merged in the studio later. It is not inherently obvious that sound and video go together in video recordings as they do today. 

Then the more amazing scanning abilities. The 2D Barcode reader, and the macro mode scanner. Did you know if you have a current high-end smartphone, like my Nokia N82 with its 5 megapixel camera resolution and macro mode, it can take sharp pictures of newspaper text, that can be read on the phone screen. Amazing..

And there are a bunch of other sensors and receivers, from the FM radio for entertainment and news, and GPS receiver for geographic positioning (obviously only on Planet Earth, ha-ha, not much use on another planet without a GPS satellite system in orbit). My N82 also has motion sensors (similar to an iPhone, if you tilt the phone, the image shifts from portrait mode to landscape, etc). And there are many communciation methods from Bluetooth and WiFi to all forms of cellular technolgoy and even infra-red transmission. There even are some software applications that let you convert a PDA or smartphone infra-red transmitter to send TV remote control signals, so you can change TV channels with your phone..

But yes, returning to Faith McGary's comments at Forum Oxford. Then we have the auto-focus sensor on the phone. To measure distance.. Yes, our smartphone has even a wireless tape measure built-in. How far to that alien, Mr Spock? Set phasers on stun, at my command...

Ha-ha, yes, it was not attempting to become a "scientific instrument" but our basic pocket phone is gaining more and more of those features that 40 years ago were very strictly impractical "far future" science fiction.

Fascinating, as Mr Spock would say.

The modern smartphone is not a complete Tri-Corder, it does not for example scan for various chemicals - although - these may be coming, from early experiments with some phones with the breath-analyzer or the pollution meter or the bad-breath warning etc - which are scanning for chemical compositions of gases.. But yes, Mr Spock would certainly approve. Our pocket device is potentially a very powerful scanning-computing-recording device. In only 40 years. Truly amazing..

PS - also there are many suppliers who provide various Tri-Corder related applications or even custom devices, to provide more accurately those functionalities of the TV series. But yes, from the Maxwell Smart shoe-phone to the Star Trek communicator form factor (ie copied in Motorola's StarTac flip phone in 1996) to James Bond's moving map in the car seen first in Goldfinger, we've seen a lot of that science fiction become fact. Now, what I really need is that Star Trek transporter to teleport me to my customers rather than taking those 12 hour flights...

Enter now, into the competition for best idea for a social marketing campaign

This is great news. One of our fave companies, Xtract, is sponsoring a competition to find the best social marketing idea(s). So you don't have to have convinced your bosses to give you the budget to do the ultimate campaign, now you can get your idea out into the open and be recognized for it. Please hop over to

http://www.xtract.com/competition2008/

and see how to enter. The deadline is a month from now, so there is plenty of time. I know we have lots of creative people here reading our stuff, from die-hard techno-geeks, to the ultra-creatives, to the young and restless students and all kinds of interested readers. Please do join and lets swamp them with great ideas. Good luck.

Oh, the jury includes our Alan Moore (and Ajit Jaokar, CEO of Futuretext who published the Communities Dominate Brands book as well as my two books since then - himself obviously a big author of many books including Mobile Web 2.0; and my old Nokia pal, Jouko Ahvainen, who now is the Chief Strategy Officer or Xtract, is there too on the jury. A very knowledgable group so you can trust good ideas will be noticed and recognized). And it has nice prizes too. Check it out..

Half of internet users now active users of IM Instant Messaging

The rapid growth of IM Instant Messaging continues. One of the stories that came out while I was on vacation, and promised to get to, was the number of active Instant Messaging (IM) users. IDC reports that the number is 750 million users, or half of the 1.5 billion internet users globally in 2008. That compares with approx 1.3 billion email user, so IM user numbers are really catching up fast to email (but are a long way from the 2.7 billion who are active users of SMS text messaging obviously, worldwide).