Mobility is at the core of a new round of innovation for businesses and the consumer. Access to information whenever and wherever one is present is going to further empower the consumer and continue to fuel a shift to the merger of the digital and physical worlds. The result being a continued and radical evolution of retail and other physically based business models across a wide swath of industries.
While Apple has delivered an exceptional product via the IPhone, theirs is not the only game in town as Android devices are beginning to rival the utility of IPhone - with the recent Sony Ericsson product being an example. By the way, you have to watch the video below to grasp the exceptional functionality of this device.
Sony Ericsson officially unveiled their first Android smartphone, the handset known as the Sony Ericsson Rachael (or Rachel), XPERIA X3 and X10 and – most recently – the Sony Ericsson Infinity. We’ve already seen a video demo of what Sony Ericsson’s custom user interface might look like but now a second demo has recently appeared and Apple best take note.
In a recent post on THE BIG MONEY, Caitlin McDevitt shared the fear and experience Wal-Mart is having with face book. A sure sign that social media is entering the main stream. Here is some of what Caitline observed:
Wal-Mart has apparently quit worrying about the negative feedback it’s bound to get online. Instead, it’s trusting that its fan base will grow larger and louder than its detractors. The page now boasts slightly more than 200,000 fans. It has grown tenfold in just two months. And according to recent reports, Wal-Mart is in the process of launching what the executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Stephen Quinn, calls a “very big, significant initiative on Facebook.” It seems that the world’s biggest retailer is preparing to win over the Facebook community once and for all. Better late than never.
As mentioned during a recent presentation at MFA, the 4 P's of marketing (price, place, product, promotion), are being replaced with value exchange, merger of the digital & physical, experience and engagement. Promotion is no longer as ROI friendly and for Wal-Mart to recognize this by diving into social media just proves the point. Read Caitlin's article for more insights.
I was again reading and reviewing Lawrence Lessig's work tonight. The man is so very articulate and his observations so compelling. If you haven't become a student of his work, please take my advice and give it a try here.
At the 2002 Open Source Convention Lessig challenged the audience to get involved in the political process. A tireless advocate for open source, Lessig shared some basic concepts that are a solution to most of the barriers preventing our soceity from overcoming the major challenges of the time. A complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002 is available here. In summation his logical findings were as follows.
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.
Watch the video from Big Thinkers wherein Lessig explains his views on freedom our culture and creativity.
I had an interesting exchange with a very reputable business associate yesterday, during which the topic of "ownership" came up as central to his business objectives. We all understand the notion, dedicate yourself to a company, build it up for years and then perhaps sell it for a premium value as you sail away into the sunset. As I woke this morning having thought about the prior days chat, another friend, Rasmus Elmann Ingerslev, had recommended a video on socialnomics that I watched, shown below. I am uncertain if most really understand what socialnomics signifies, as I've concluded its only the beginning of a far larger trend with greater implications beyond those of my facebook account. Similarly I am unclear if most business owners understand what the value of something really is and how these trends will impact it. Hence this post.
What socialnomics represents is the first wave in a series of approaching changes brought on by technology, which will deconstruct numerous and long standing economic paradigms including, among others, distribution, value creation and value exchange. How ? Because social technologies decentralize everything by empowering choice through the ubiquity of information. Social media is but the beginning of a series of tools that will provide users complete control over what is authentic, valuable and meaningful to them, thus obfuscating centralization in any and all systems. This is the essence of "socialnomics": economic rules redefined via new "social media", I call it technological, tools.
How economics are redefined by socialnomics is very simple. In the past people created wealth largely through one basic principal - they had information others did not and exploited that information to their benefit at the cost of others. These information disparities could last for extended periods and therefore organizations could be sustained for periods of time wherein an advantage existed. In the new economics this will become increasingly difficult because of the ubiquity of information. In "free markets" margins are driven towards zero. Therefore, value will have to be created in new ways, largely via increasingly short term creations of unique solutions. Thus value will be driven increasingly by what customers choose - not in how they are exploited by sustained information disparities or anomalies: a concept shared by the like of Toffler, Anderson and others.
The implications to organizations are enormous because competitive advantages will be increasingly fleeting. In Fung and Wind's book Competing in a Flat World, the notion of value and network organizations is craft fully set out, particularly how organizations must reengineer to become valuable. I've posted on the matter previously. In the old paradigm you could create something of value, build a fence around it and get someone to covet it enough to purchase it. In the new world, the platform is the value, change is too rapid to maintain an extended advantage and in the end your value is only that which your customers deem you deserve. With increasingly lower barriers to entry and free information too many alternatives are available. Think about it, who "owns" Google ? Truthfully, its customers do. If tomorrow everyone stopped using Google its "value" would be zero. Socialnomics reflects a free market in the purest sense and therefore, I ponder if many in business have grasped that fact when they imagine their sailing away into the sunset as a result of something they've built over years. That, I think, will becoming an increasingly rare occurrence.
Mobility is at the core of a new round of innovation for businesses and the consumer. Access to information whenever and wherever one is present is going to further empower the consumer and continue to fuel a shift to the merger of the digital and physical worlds. The result being a continued and radical evolution of retail and other physically based business models across a wide swath of industries.
