What's wrong with this country? What, a digital TV isn't good enough for you? DIsappointing, that's what you are. Now it looks like the 2006 cutoff date for broadcasters to finally shut off their analog signals and only broadcast digital (hopefully high definition) has been delayed. Actually, the law says "either December 31, 2006 or when 85 percent of the television audience can receive digital, whichever comes later." So, thanks a bunch. Enjoy that tube TV from 1985 you're watching.

Ok, so it hasn't quite been the revolution the HDTV originators expected. U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens today named 2009 the big year and hopes three Christmas buying seasons will give you slackers enough time to get up to speed. Now get on the ball, will you?

US Senate Commerce boss backs 2009 digital TV move [Reuters]

4:49:10 PM    comment   

This is a somewhat dangerous essay to write, as you could readily draw all sorts of wrong conclusions. But I suspect there is a kernel of truth that is worth the long process of extraction.

Exhibit A: Umair anticipates “hypercivilization” — “a space where everything is hyperreal; hyperlinked, simulated, plastic, liquid, etc.”. A virtual world of virtual relationships and virtual pleasure.

Exhibit B: An extraordinarily long, detailed and challenging inquiry into the nature of human happiness, its chemical and biological origins inside us, and our liberation from “Darwinian” suffering of the mind. The debate is half pharmacological (could we replicate the positive aspects of the MDMA experience across large populations indefinitely?), half philosophical on the benefits (or otherwise) of such advances.

At the heart of their thesis is this:

Fortunately there is no reason, in principle, why an analogue of Moore’s law can’t be implemented in successive generations of the reward circuitry of organic life-forms. The affective, aesthetic, intellectual, interpersonal (and spiritual?) well-being of neurochemical robots like us can be genetically pre-coded. If rationally redesigned, our enlightened successors may view today’s “natural” rewards as poor surrogates for genetically underwritten happiness. When the mechanisms underlying bliss and its gradients are understood, the molecular machinery of the sublime can be modulated - and amplified indefinitely.

The interesting bit to me was learning about all the different forms of reward circuitry in the brain and the interlocking regulatory mechanisms. Naturally, the elimination of mental anguish whilst maintaining touch with reality (whatever that is) is a multi-generational project of immense difficulty, as the authors stress.

The connection beween the two exhibits isn’t so obscure; we’re entering a world where our social relationships are frequently mediated by machines. The next “logical” step is where the link between our external senses and our internal id is mediated by technology — in this case utopian pharmacology, gene therapy and eugenics.

The ultimate irony of “intelligence at the edge” is that it turns out to be us, and we don’t always like what we see:

Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past.

The ambitious program of work they lay out is intended to address this toxic legacy. Misguided? Maybe, but equally inevitible in its arrival.

But what on earth has this to do with telecom?

Technologies like SMS could be seen as a form of self-medication for temporary social isolation. Need a dopamine squirt? Text a few friends, and get your reward when they return the compliment. Remember the cocaine-fuelled lab rats self-administering hits until they drop? I bet they have some great jokes they share between cages at night about humans and SMS. Cue suitable Larson cartoon.

Well, today’s there’s no such discipline as biotelecology. We don’t have teens strapped into fMRI scanners seeing how their mesolimbic pathway lights up for each ring tone.

But maybe we should? Forget all those boring customer surveys and focus groups. Just experiment with thousands of simulated product concepts and watch the customer neurons at work!

Sounds silly? Well, OK, let’s just do it as a thought experiment instead. Imagine in my IM/VoIP client I can right-click on any contact, and select “Wave to Bob”. Bob then sees his Martin icon waving back when he comes online. Maybe I can even tag the wave “Happy Birthday”. No, it isn’t an IM because it doesn’t demand a response — there’s no text entry pop-up where Bob feels obliged to acknowledge your wave. (You don’t send thank-you cards in return for birthday cards you receive, so why should you online?)

So in some way I’m triggering Bob’s reward and wellbeing circuitry. It’s just we have no real idea which ones. Yet shouldn’t every communications product ask “how does this light up the pleasure and reward circuitry in users”?

We could be building better communications products by also asking the question: how does my product appeal to Darwinian and post-Darwinian values?

Let’s take a Darwinian example first. We out-maneuvred the sabre-toothed tigers by enlarging our brains and living in close-knit cooperative communities. We are hyper-social, but also adapted to form a social hierarchy. The quoted article even argues that conditions like depression are adaptations to help low-status individuals channel (or extinguish) their survival and reproductive energies.

So how do our communications tools come to reflect social hierarchy? Here’s an example. If you’re both running the latest release of Skype, you can view in turn how many buddies each of your buddies has:

I now am socially humiliated - a total outcast. I mean, only 68 people on Martin’s buddy list! What a loser…

(Not sure what’s making Stuart look so happy, but I know I want some. Well, actually theobromine does me fine — all donations welcome, minimum 60% cocoa, dark preferred — and caffeine is waaay too stong for me most of the time!)

Without knowing it, Skype has just taken a small step in the Darwinian direction. What if every “Voice 2.0” telephony system published the number of calls each user made and received, the number of minutes they spent using it, and the status level of those callers? Score bonus marks if you have an assistant to answer the damned machine for you! Seriously, we have no idea how people’s behaviour might change. We could guess, but a century of rigid assumptions about what telephony is and does has left us bereft of imagination of how it could be different.

I guess we can push our drugs analogy a bit further. After all, what’s the point of a colourful metaphor if not to be pushed to breaking point? The Darwinian drugs are the “isolators” such as cocaine. They re-inforce destructive egotistical pleasure-seeking. The post-Darwinian ones are the ones that enhance self- and social awareness (entactogens). This is a much smaller group. (Maybe tobacco smoking is so addictive because of the social bonding it provides among smokers, as a pseudo-entactogen?) Shouldn’t you be asking which drugs your product resembles, how to get the users hooked, how to enhance the high, and how to ensure coninued addiction?

Just think of the “I am socially important and necessary to the operation of this enterprise” that the Blackberry brings. First it divides the “ordinary” staff from the executives who are traditionally issued with them. Then the egos of the holders have to be stroked continually to maintain their self-esteem. Pure Darwinan approach. If you want to beat the Crackberry, build a product that puts empathy and co-operation at its heart. What does an “E-berry” look like? I don’t know, but I expect it’ll come in pink and the secretaries will buy them first.

Likewise, the status symbol of having a “car phone” propelled the status-worth image of cellular telephony.

Take MMS as another example. This is a post-Darwinian product; one that should bring us closer to one-another. But it was a market flop on release. One reason MMS missed the mark was because, well, it didn’t deliver enough brain happy-juice for the price. A single lousy picture of the grandkids at the zoo? What you want is to share the experience with those not present, not just a moment. And that’s more than one lousy picture. You want to share a whole stream of images throughout your visit. There should be anticipation of more coming. The sense of being there for grandma is accentuated as she receives in (near real-time) updates of your progress. Ooh — they’re at the monkey house now! (And you can now see how mobile video would possibly be less attractive than a stream of camera messages with the occasional tagged on audio commentary, since the temptation would be to create an anthology video later on in the event rather than the feeling of real-time sharing.)

The product and pricing didn’t lend themselves to this, hence the failure to meet market expectations. Too hard to organize an album being shared as it is created, too costly to send one. A better product would probably have been priced on a “per day” basis: become an MMS user for the day, send as many as you want. Only $2! And it would always offer to send the next picture to the same recipient as the last one — one click.

How would you re-work directory enquiries in this biochemical reward model? Can’t say. There’s probably a way to portray users as more socially successful. Have a TV advert that contrasts the inept non-user funbling to find a number by calling friends with someone who just stumps up the cash and calls for help. The main aim of this product is avoiding pain, not engaging pleasure. You sell more of it by exaggerating the pain of not having it.

Put on your shades and look at your computer screen. Imagine they are magic polarizers: look one way, and you see pleasure; look the other way round, pain. What about your communications tools is visibly glowing with pleasure? A new email? From whom? Which parts of my product transcend the merely functional? How can I better explot those parts? What would a super-rewarding email client do with new email? How could I share my “Wow! A message from Bob!” feeling? What if the response was automatically prefixed with “Martin immediately responds:” by the system, so Bob sees how much priority I give him? I think you get the idea, even if the example is lousy.

It isn’t a surprise we don’t have a root “reward” model for communications product design that reflects our biological makeup. It’s a massive challenge. It’s a shame we don’t often relate to a Maslow-type model of reward and motivation that at least abstracts away the biochemical complexity. It’s a problem when you’re a telco, and you don’t have a model of what makes people do more of what makes them feel good. It’s a tragedy when 80%+ of your revenue comes from one or two communications products, and you have no model of what the users do with them and how you might get them to do more of it. It’s a serious farce when you don’t have “get users to make more phone calls and SMS messages” as key objectives!

Sadly, from what I’ve seen, much of the industry is at the “farce” level still. Basic questions of how to get people to consume more telephony, and get a bigger kick out of it, go unanswered. At Sprint I couldn’t find anything about what people do with their mobile phones and how we might get them to do more of it! Making more phone calls wasn’t a product selection criterion. Yet whether your means are Darwinian or post-Darwinian, the objective remains the same.

How we will manipulate ourselves internally in future to achieve perpetual hedonic bliss, I don’t know. It certainly adds a whole new dimesion to achieving The American Dream for those on that side of the pond. But the ideas of pleasure, reward, pain and social anguish are ones that are powerful indicators of success and failure in technologies that operate outside the mind and body. You would do well to understand and harness them.

4:15:23 PM    comment   

I’ve been challenged by a source working for a mobile operator whether my view of IMS is too pessimistic. He writes:

The big reason for carriers to implement IMS is not merely a matter of re-structuring our services in a TCP/IP-oriented fashion, or being able to do seamless provisioning. […]

It is the “enabling” portion of it that matters. Moving to IMS will let mobile operators (for instance) deploy integrated services that can tie together core enablers such as a profile database, a presence server, billing hooks, etc. to build a whole new service with theoretically less time and effort. Essentially, it’s about moving from monolithic, one-piece, vertical services into a component-oriented approach.

Of course, current demo services aren’t that enticing — mostly because this entails a new way of thinking about service design that hasn’t really sunk in yet, and there is the usual amount of experimentation going on. I personally think this will throw up a few good ideas in a year’s time (or even less) as telcos open up to outside partners doing the actual development.

So, the yellow brick road that takes us back to happy, profitable telecomland seems to have a fork. Turn left, kill wicked witch, deploy new services, become rich. Turn right, open up our platform, let the scarecrow and tin man work out what the best services are, click heels, get rich.

Unfortunately, this wizard can’t offer a happy ending for either direction.

Can the carriers deliver on the promise of great new application services?

One way is that they themselves research and discover them. But the precedents are mixed at best. Take MMS (again). What could be simpler than getting users to exchange pictures? But it was a commercial flop. It misunderstood what the value proposition was in the eyes of the user. As I said before, people wanted to share experiences — as sense of “being there”, not just pictures. This means sharing a whole sequence of pictures during a day, and unintrusively allowing a whole string of receipients not at the party/zoo/bar mitzvah to keep up with the event. MMS didn’t define a photo repository API, make sharing across mobile and PC devices simple, etc. Recipients had no easy way of saving and organising the pictures. They couldn’t track things at their leisure.

And at the prices charged, sharing a whole day’s “roll of film” was just prohibitively expensive. You didn’t even get a little stack of pictures to hide in a shoebox under the stairs! MMS’s immediacy wasn’t enough to overcome its deficiencies in competing with the Kodak experience. Flickr got it, telcos didn’t.

So even the simplest of services turned out to be a screw-up. On the other hand, Sha-mail was a success. Sprint’s picture service, which did incorporate Flickr-like features (outsourced to Lightsurf) was a success. Funnily enough, these are the products that didn’t fall out of a standards committee.

[Insider knowledge: picture messaging was a low priority in the Sprint PCS Vision launch, and it only made the cut because the handset folks were only being offered camera phones by the main Korean and Japanese suppliers. There weren’t any non-camera models around to stock, so there was no choice in having a picture messaging product! The big news was supposed to be Java downloads and ringtones, but these turned out to be much less compelling to the users. And instant messaging never made the launch, despite being the most in-demand feature requested by the target youth/early adopter demographic! I look forward to contradictory reminiscences from former Sprint colleagues…]

So there’s good reason to believe that joint efforts of telcos to develop new services will face an uphill struggle. And stand-alone efforts, as noted previously, are limited by your connectivity user base and are in competition against those of Internet giants.

Rather than ‘build’, how about ‘buy’? Can’t you just wait to see what takes off and then buy your way in? Well, that sounded like a nice theory, at least until last week. Then we got to see the price of that strategy. Ouch!

So being the owner of the end application didn’t work. What else is there? Well, you can shred your business model into itsy bitsy chunks, turn yourself into a platform, open up, charge some access fees, and let someone else take the credit.

This is an attractive proposition, and one I’ve promoted extensively. It’s just a shame IMS doesn’t deliver on it. All the key bits — federated identitity, profile, billing — aren’t covered by IMS, which is stuck in a old-skool mindset of the services living inside a telco-owned application server working to telco-owned customer data. You don’t need much sophistication in privacy and permissions control when you federate with yourself. There’s no unified developer program. The architecture is horifically complex. It cuts out the cheap P2P delivery options. It mandates specific technologies (e.g. SIP) when others (e.g. IAX) may be more appropriate for some tasks. No doubt it’ll be a lowest common denominator in presence — your “Away on vacation” status may not be supported, never mind “Needs cheering up”. So I’m not exactly optimistic that this route will play out well for the telcos either.

Mobile operators have a better excuse for IMS than fixed ones. There’s still a scarcity of capacity that requires some form of QoS rationing — at least some of the time. As networks get faster, that need decreases. (All those Skype calls on EV-DO seem to work fine without IMS!) But application-specific ways of tying connectivity and service together to do QoS aren’t the way to do it.

4:14:42 PM    comment