Couldn’t it be different, when this company is a the major player on the Internet market and on the advertising market, but it’s also a main character in all the major business trends, such as semantics, gaming, mobile, micro-payment and (recently) e-books?

But let’s see some news, all part of the global scenario:

• “Is Google a content company?” (07/03/08), which is only one of the several news on Google as semantics trendsetter;
• “Google to play games with AdSense” (10/11/08), which is one of the first news of this kind;
• “WPP and Google Launch Media Research Grant Program” (10/29/08), which is almost the official entrance of Google into the traditional advertizers list;
• “Introducing AdSense for mobile search” (02/13/09), which is the second, obvious extension of Google’s main feature in the emerging mobile market;
• “Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: Open need not mean free” (09/11/09), which is more relevant than the former launch of CheckOut;
• and, recently, “Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format” (10/17/09), a direct consequence of Books and a direct move “against” Amazon.

In my previous post “I’d love work with Amazon” I already spoke about “Amazon rolls out mobile app payment service”.
This is a very hot topic, as the news record another company acting in the same direction: “Nokia and Tanla Sign an Agreement for License Management, Mobile Payments and Professional Services”.
Well, Google is acting also on this issue, with a diversified strategy which could on the one hand let it test the solution and on the other gather other players to develop it.

Keeping an eye on what Google does is actually a good way to see where there is the most of the potential future business.
Others are keeping the other eye on financial outcomes (Google’s III quarter seems we can think the crisis is over), but those are only a passive global economic litmus paper.

Ever since its creation Amozon has been a trendsetter in the todays business, not only having put in practice the “long tail” theory but also always being in front line with all the major innovation issues, such as virtualization, intellectual property and now micropayments.

First time I thought Amazon was one of my trendsetters was when one of its business characteristics (the “Long Tail“) assured as business theory thanks to Chris Anderson.
Then I came across “Data mining at Amazon.com“, which changed my way of thinking digital business.
Lately, I recorded:

• “TiVo, Amazon Offer Downloads to TV” (07/07), which showed the attention to online share rather than selling, with a good test with the most innovative actor in modern broadcasting;
• “Amazon to Buy Audiobook Seller for $300 Million” (02/08), which anticipated the one-tear-later revived audiobook business, showing an accurate market protection as well;
• “Microsoft helps Amazon soar in the cloud” (10/08), which confirms the company’s up-to-date technology ambient, anticipating the public adoption of cloud computing;
• “Amazon Snags Gaming Company Reflexive” (10/08), which is another good protection move, in the always exploding game market;
• “SnapTell acquired by Amazon.com subsidiary A9.com” (06/09), which means putting one’s head into the “visual search” and the “mobile application” market at the same time;
• and, finally (at least of what I recorded) “Amazon rolls out mobile app payment service”:

“Online retail giant Amazon.com announced the availability of its Amazon Mobile Payments Service, promising mobile application developers, merchants and distributors tools to process payments from mobile devices and extend Amazon’s 1-Click checkout experience to their customers. Amazon MPS enables Amazon customers to use the existing payment and shipping information in their Amazon.com accounts to make purchases via mobile device–after signing in from an Amazon MPS-enabled handset or app, consumers are automatically equipped to make future purchases. Amazon adds its APIs will enable developers and merchants to extend single or multi-use payment options–moreover, partners who already offer Amazon Payments on their website can add the new mobile payment option without any additional backend technology development.”

Simply taking into consideration what Amazon does is a way to keep oneself always update.
It has an uncommon way to protect its market, not only keeping focused but mainly investing in all the possible innovative niches it bears. That could be very useful for any national player in the book selling market, to follow the emerging trends and avoid the risk to be out thrown by one’s own market.

But it’s facts such as the management of Orwell’s copyright on Kindle showed one of the main reasons Amazon began to sell digital copies of books:

• obviously it’s a way to sell more books;
• obviously it’s a way to sell another “piece of electronics”;
• but it’s also a way to test on the market the “new” way of dealing with copyright issues, which will soon evolve and transform Amazon’s market into “to-be-defined” new business model.

The final move into the micropayment market is “only” a logic consequence.
Many other products sales are starting to become “rentals”. The copyright model is based on “number of uses” of the item. The only way to match the two characteristics is to prepare oneself to “sell the use” of content (which is also a trend in the news sector) and micropayments are the only media one could imagine to complete the circle.

In synthesis, that’s why I wish I could work with Amazon.
It sums up all the issues I love, it’s always anticipating them (in order to buy a company or enter a market one has to imagine it quite some time before), it’s really the best place for me to work now.
I guess I should send them a resume …

As comment to the current update of the “Communication Global Scenario“, I wish to point out how content is over and over the real evolution point of mobile, but there’s no evident and current news that show the real engagement of big players into this market.

Let’s see the latest and less considered news:

• Fox Mobile Distribution Strikes Deal to Integrate Mobile Content on AOL’s Winamp (04/13/09)
• Nokia’s Latest Buy: Mobile Geotargeted Ad Firm (09/13/09)
• MySpace Breaks Into Mobile Ad Market (12/06/08)

Those three news show:

• content players (like Fox) are starting to test their assets on mobile-like platforms, but still without much commitment (Fox and AOL are part of News Corp group);
• mobile hardware payers (like Nokia) are evolving into service companies, which is not a trend but the mere possible way for them to keep their market share;
• distribution payers (like MySpace) are going mobile only because they lost the online advertising train.

My conclusion is that we won’t see a “mobile take-off” unless:

• the public revert from web to mobile at a more speed pace than expected (but that’s not the case in the main trending market – the US – due to too high consumer prices);
• the telecommunication crisis ends before expected (but it has to solve energy and business model’s problems), which could support reversion from land to mobile connection.

As these two conditions are far to become real, even the big players on the market are continuing to test, without any real shake to the current scenario.

“Embrace constraints”, “practice restraint”, “adopt the beginner’s mind”, “check your ego at the door”, “focus on the experience of the design”, “become a master storyteller”, “think communication not decoration”, “obsess about ideas not tools”, “clarify your intention”, “sharpen your vision & curiosity and learn from the lessons around you” and, finally, “learn all the rules and know when and why to break them”: those should all be part of our mindset when working in the actual business world.

Reading the “10 Tips on how to think like a designer” reminded me the times when I contributed to the design of many products and to their winning Design Awards all around Europe.
My approach was always on the maximum respect to design experience (it’s a mindset, developed through application on diversified markets and products) and my expertise was mainly in my ability to storytelling and communication.

But the start was always in

• clarifying the overall intention, which was mainly the service we wished to supply to people, being it a brand new one or a evolved one from a traditional approach;
• be very serious on finding ideas beneath tools, becoming a creator and not a technician;
• and curiously searching the market for any inspiration, which could be trans-functional or trans-national, always looking at things with the simple sight of a child, leaving aside the formal aspects and concentrating on substance.

Note: taking into account that I’m more a marketer than a designer, my most important function in the designing group was to keep it strictly connected with the market’s reality, avoiding that creativity could start prevailing by itself, ending the process in a concept product / service with very much immediate ROI.

But the most difficult part of the job was to “embrace constraints”, “practice restraint”.
Being the first phase a mixture between research and brainstorming, the difficulty were in keeping the creation of the idea within limits of the ambient where it was conceived. Creativity is richness, finding an idea is always powerful, but those two media frequently are “against” reality, which needs them but within the limits of economics.
Once a very good friend of mine told me that “an idea is not such if it’s not transformed into something real”.
A clear imagine of what the market asks for, of what we’re able to do, of the time involved into the process, of the involved resources is the basis of any designing process and the greatest enemy to creativity, at least of free creativity. But we live in a well constituted world, where rules are set and cannot be changed either without a great investment (in money or time) or with a very good idea.
So, reality is sometimes a limit but sometimes it’s a boundary that creativity is able to surpass.

When the latest case occurs, then “breaking the rules” is really fun.

A few good friends know that I’ve been on a new revenue models in advertising for at least five years, didn’t find it yet, but sure that it’s over the current “Free, Free+ADs or Fee” models because we’re in the Web 2 context and the value of revenue should be set by the public.A very general reading of latest “Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals” by a couple of Harvard Business School’s authors shows a scenario which is not the right one: one model is fighting another.We have to understand that any current model will necessary evolve and only the winning evolution will prevail.IMHO the way to discover which one will be the “winner” starts focusing on the basics. We are now in an era where:

• our public increases in quantity (and it’s not only duplication, as the overall population increased and new areas started to be exposed to communication media);
• those individuals are no more mere passive actors but active ones and the trend (with technology lowering the financial access point to media) is an exponential increase of the the Web 2 attitude.

So the first conclusion could be: the value of our communication is not the number of eyes who see our ad but the number of people that interact with it.The second issue which should be taken into consideration is the ability of measuring any digital activity, made by communicating and made by interacting.I don’t want a “Orwell’s 1984″ world, but I accept that our current technological situation enables us such control.So we can be sure we have the means to determine the “new” value of communication (if we want to).The third issue is the benefits that our public gets from our action.We could measure it summing the value of purchased goods or (and that’s possible: it’s called knowledge evaluation) of acquired knowledge.In the first case we can collect data from a company, in the second case the knowledge value will generate further communication, which will be measured, which will create benefits, which will be measured, which …It’s not a virtuous circle, I think it’s a different way to see the process and, mostly, a more “natural” one, as it consider the way things go in the current system and simply apply a measurement system to them.

In the next few weeks, Japanese copy and photo manufacturer Ricoh will launch a Times Square spectacular powered by wind. The sign, using wind turbine technology developed by WePOWER, will be powered by 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, saving 18 tons of carbon per year and about $12,000 to $15,000 a month in electricity.

Nelle prossime settimane, Ricoh lancerà una pubblicità a Times Square alimentata dal vento. Sarà alimentato da 16 turbine eoliche da WePOWER e 64 pannelli solari, con un risparmio di 18 tonnellate di carbonio l’anno e di circa $ 12.000 $ 15.000 /mese di energia elettrica.

I read the article “The Quad-force: Person, Place, Time & Content and got strucked by the title (even if the text is very interesting too).Those four listed elements are to be the most important issues in the near future and their combination is to be the ground of the near future battle for supremacy on media and users.But I wish to add a little detail: the “place” is very important for selling (i.e. it’s lunch time, I’m in my car waiting for the green, a message pops-up on my navigation screen showing a promotion e-coupon from the restaurant I can see, … I park and go) but it can also be a very important problem for privacy. As soon as we keep everything on the same level (phisical in a phisical world, digital in a digital world), anyone can eventually keep control of her/his ambient, but when we start to mix them, nobody can know all the possible interactions sources … and that’s where privacy could become a major problem.

Each year since 1985, the editors of “The Futurist” have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine to go into our annual Outlook report. I took the editors’ top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2009 and tried to comment them:1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.Even now, if you sign-in your Google account and use their Latitude service, all your Internet activity is recorded with your exact geo-position. “Big Brother” is not only public- but also privately owned. To advertisers that is good news (deeper profiling), to individuals it’s not.2. Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible.That could be less a threat if all the law systems follow the Japanese example: equalization of physical and digital personal identity.3. The car’s days as king of the road may soon be over.As soon as we consider cars not as transportation objects but as transportation services, if they are substituted by other media it’s not relevant.4. Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized.[see comment on point 6]5. There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world’s legal systems will be networked.That’s not true, as world standards will have to be set, in order to let everybody work globally with precise rules, specifications and references. There will still local rules, but different from the current ones: people will reorganize differently from now, choosing to settle down where personal conditions and goals are guaranteed.6. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it’s acquired.All the educational system will have to transform itself, to follow two trends: the job market and the personal attitude. Educational institutions will have to fulfil both expectations in order to survive.7. The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will-in the twenty-first century-be what the space race was in the previous century.[see comment on point 2]8. Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.That will be more in the developing countries than in the others. Cities will become service centres, linked to industrial zones and servicing scattered urbanizations. The American model will pervade the whole world, while “specialized” countries (i.e. Italy, for tourism) will transform themselves to specific economical models.9. The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow.That’s a big problem, as cultural differences between western and eastern people will get bigger.10. Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.My personal opinion is that electricity will have to reach 99.9% of population ASAP, as that energy is the only medium for companies and governments to reach and manage their population in the near future.

http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2009/03/consumers-in-a-downturn-a-new-consumer-habit.html

Here you find a very clear scenario, worth considering / È uno scenario molto chiaro, da leggere.

The problem of contextual learning is strictly linked to another issue: response to current situation.

On Online Spin for Thursday, January 29, 2009, Dave Morgan wrote “It’s impossible to avoid the constant flow of news, criticism and finger-pointing related to the financial crisis. [...] In a discussion on this topic yesterday with a close friend of mine, we were speculating how the country’s business schools were coping with this crisis. Certainly, many of them have suffered significant losses in their portfolios. Of course, many of them may also be seeing record numbers of applications as laid-off workers and jobless recent college grads look to business schools for a two-year respite from the crisis. But most importantly, how many business school leaders are looking past these two looming issues and asking themselves the really hard question, which is: Where did they go wrong in training the last generation of business leaders? [...]”

In my opinion the current is a moment when the learning systems should stop and rethink its nature:

• the system is still based on what set by European Jesuits in 1800, when books were rare and only high class people could be educated; now education is formally available to everybody and books are less important due to the “big library”, the Internet;
• courses are centrally set and rarely revised on the current social and economical situation; we have to admit that all schools and colleges are settled in our global system and should react to it, leaving behind the “educational standardization” that is more negative than positive;
• Dave’s question should make us realize that social, intercultural and ethical knowledge should be more important than standard educational knowledge. It’s true that you cannot understand the first without knowing the last one, but the system shouldn’t stress on the last one leaving the real understanding of the first one to personal or to specialized education.

To make a personal example, I waited my 21st year and second year in college to understand the Medieval times, with all the relevant links to West and East European and Muslim cultural collision. But, still, nobody went on telling me how all that could have a link to current cultural impact.
And that’s not due to the fact I was educated in Italy.

PS: great John Robb’s post on the same issue:
“Education, in its current form is an admixture of industrial and artisan processes. While the quantities of product (graduates) produced and the facilities resemble industrial processes, the actual production is most closely akin to artisanship (with guilds, no less!). Regardless, this process has become an albatross of cost and stagnating quality. For example, costs for collegiate education have increased 4.39 times faster than inflation over the past three decades and has now eclipsed affordability for most households (median incomes have stagnated during this same period) with no appreciable improvement in the quality of graduates. Worse, there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree. Since nearly all of the value of an education has been extracted by the producer, to the detriment of the customer, this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade.
Fortunately, with the implosion of this bubble, the opportunity to introduce improvements will emerge. The most interesting of these improvements is the ability of collaborative online education to replace much, if not most of in person teaching.”

The main point is not (as anybody would say) the “new” opportunity to free lectures (instead of paying $50K/year in class). The issue that struck me was the use of “context” related to “lectures”, arguing that only in class one can get the most of it.
I see that the opposite way:

• I was educated a few decades ago, when information was not available the way it is now through the Web;
• I had to search for it on books, either buying them or reading them in libraries;
• I just finished lecturing in one of the local universities, seeing that:
  • the students mainly used digital information and I myself used much of it as references in my lectures;
  • but the nature of these references were on current issues, practical cases, examples, thoughts, opinions, news, … a lot of information tightly linked to the current moment, to today’s issues, … a lot distant from all information one could get from books (that naturally do have month’s delays from the current moment);
• so my opinion was:
  • the class I was lecturing in was merely a practical location where students were gathering to listen;
  • any other reason (i.e. research) was linked to the ability of the university or the lecturer to link its speech to outside context (either inviting companies to let students work on their projects in the campus or letting students have a learning stage in companies).

My personal conclusions are those:

• education is half information and half experience transmission: the first part could be gathered by using the Web, the second part could be achieved by interacting in professional networks;
• the real contextual education (now that specialization is extremely important) has a logic if only companies start to lecture within their organizations, to get the ability they need from the people they choose;
• maybe we all should go back to ancient Medieval times, when headmasters were lecturing their juniors, who could start their experience with hard work and could eventually start their own activity as soon as their ability was ready to let them do their way.

Welcome to online lecturing: it that is another universities’ marketing activity I fear it will develop into the start of a new way of educating our children, one that is potentially current and needs only those contents to become reality.