Jas Business Blog

If you have seen the last earnings presentation of Microsoft, you would have seen the biggest optimistic line in that presentation – strong product pipeline. We will see in couple of posts under this series – Emerging Technologies that in which all baskets is Microsoft putting its eggs. One such strong market is the (multi) touch based devices which has been betting on gesture recognition technology. And Microsoft is betting its next few devices, including XBox, on gesture and speech recognition. One such technology which Microsoft announced in 2008 is Surface. Codenamed Milan, Microsoft Surface is a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user(s) to manipulate digital content by the use of gesture recognition and has ability to interact with living as well as non living entities.

To keep things geekly simple, Microsoft Surface is a surface computing platform (where GUI is intuitively placed on a touch-sensitive screen and user interacts directly with it) that responds to natural hand gestures and real world objects. It has a 360-degree user interface, with a projector underneath the surface which projects an image onto its underside, while cameras  record reflections of infrared light from objects and human fingertips on the surface. The surface is capable of object recognition, object/finger orientation recognition and tracking, and is multi-touch and is multi-user. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving placed objects. This paradigm of interaction with computers is known as a natural user interface (NUI).

Enough of geekness, lets see what it can do. Surface lets you literally grab digital content with one’s hands and move information with simple gestures and touches, something which was revolutionized by Apple’s iPhone. Surface also sees and interacts with any object placed on the screen, allowing one to move information between devices or adding or accessing the information on those objects. Say one wants to order a hot cappuccino from 20 odd favors offered by a cafe chain, one can choose between the options using Surface, see calorie or ingredient information as one would see in internet, then place a customized order. Once the order arrives, Surface can understand when waiter places Coffee on it. Now you may want to leisure your time away, creating your play-list of your favorite songs on Surface, and browsing through the historic details of how coffee is made, see the videos of plantations from where your Coffee beans were plucked etc. Or say you just had a trip to Himalayas and want to share your images from camera to the Smartphone you are carrying. All you need to do is place compatible camera and phone on the Surface and it will recognize them giving you an options menu, you can then select to transfer the images to your phone without even touching any of these two, just by placing them on Surface! To be frank, this is one technology product which is still looking for the areas where it can be applied to, opportunities are endless but commercial viability and idea limitation are to play the devil’s advocate. Click here to see the sample applications which Microsoft showcases on its Surface website.

The idea of surface came when Microsoft in 2002 undertook a project to ensure that the company expands its role as a major player in the consumer market by creating, developing and marketing a new software platform. Microsoft hired Cheskin, a …., for ideation and to generate additional concepts. Each member was then issued pretend venture capital dollars to fund the concepts given by Cheskin that most appealed to them. This “VC investor” exercise had each team have only 10 minutes to pitch their concept to “potential investors.” PlayTable (now Surface) was the clear winner.

Microsoft is mainly looking at B2C market for acceptance of this product, hence is all set to woo businesses, and is creating enough noise about the product so as to increase the consumer acceptability once installations are done by businesses. As of now Microsoft has entered into partnerships with Harrah, Starwood Hotels, T-Mobile and International Games Technology (which produces Microsoft games).  T-Mobile is planning to use Surface at its sales terminals. Surface will recognize a phone placed on the tabletop and provide the phone’s characteristics and a price list. Customers will be able to drag icons that represent parts of a service plan onto the phone and place an order for purchase. Starwood explores the possibilities of using the computers for photo sharing, music play-list browsing, food and beverage ordering, games and game-related activities, and as a ‘virtual concierge’. Harrah’s wants to use the Surface tables to let people access maps of its different properties, find out the details about events and venues, as well as create their personal itineraries.

The consumer version of the product is expected to come in 2015, in case the product picks up. So lets see what is in store for Microsoft Surface.

Am starting a new chain of blog posts on the emerging technologies, the ones that have come in at least Alpha phase of development or which have a high probability of being next revolutionary technology. You may have heard about the technology already, in that case bear with me. And in case I have got some thing wrong in explanation or concept, please feel free to comment on it, they are more than welcome.

The main problem an emerging technology faces is the tough task of making followers out of people who sample it. If an early adopter finds the technology useless or lacking,then the technology has lost a string of customers already from that one single person. And even if the technology appeals with Early adopters, the visionaries will pass the judgment on whether the technology can be utilized fully (see Product Life Cycle diagram below). Hence the crucial area called Chasm, which is the make or break phase for a technology. Emerging technology markets often stall when they reach this phase. It is too late to attract new Visionaries , who are not interested because they can’t be the first to adopt the technology, and too early to attract Pragmatists, who are too risk averse to invest in solutions from anyone but established market leaders that have been referred by a trusted source. (Pragmatists invest in solutions, not technology, and consider Visionaries to be risk takers. Therefore, they are not inclined to consider them trusted references.)

I shall discuss the technologies which are yet to pass through the Chasm phase.

The first technology that I will be blogging about is Microsoft Surface.

With information gaining vital importance in our daily lives, many people have started saying that we have entered an information age since last few years. IT companies are covering the distance between zero and billion in the shortest time for any company. The media has seen a bursting high in last decade as information has never been so easy to interchange, and when information is bombarded in our lives so heavily the next major thing is searching for the right information. So stress has been lately on how to structure the information, index it, make relationships between various information units so as to have a meaningful search. To reach this we need heuristic information, where the ‘thumb of rules’ are identified from experience.

“We’re not trying to provide users with an alternative income, but the Scour points programme is a good way for us to reward users for helping to build up the community, to refine search results beyond the ordinary algorithms,” concluded Yomtobian. Scour.com is owned and operated by ABCSearch, a part of Internext Media Corporation.

You can visit the search engine at http://scour.com

Website: http://www.whopperfreakout.com/

• Indicate Credit Level based on past history
• Select Features and Rewards – like if one wants rewards in form of miles/points or cash back; the introductory APR, annual fee etc
• Pick a Design – one can choose from a given set of 9 designs or one can add own image to the card (now thats customization!)
• Review and Apply

The choices are then packaged together to create a card customized to each cardholders’ personal preferences. This concept is being used in the USA for the first time whereas this has been tested before in UK and Turkey.

However, there are some trade offs in this venture. Once the applicant makes a choice, a certain number of other choices are closed for him. So, if you want no-frills, no rewards, you can get a lower interest rate. Want points or air miles? The interest rate goes up. Want a 0% interest rate for a year? Expect a higher ongoing rate. Want two points per dollar charged instead of one? Prepare to pay an annual fee.

From a marketing point of view, it does make an impact on consumers for following main reasons:

1. Empowerment
This concept gives the power in the hand of consumer to design what ever they feel like. This brings in more brand loyalty as consumer identifies more with the product.

2. Transparency
The selection process allows consumer to see the trade offs with every selection, hence consumer can know how the APR or annual fee change on selecting the desired cash back for example. The generic way of personalization was to have an online interview approach and make a product recommendation at the end of the process. This is an abstract way as consumer doesn’t know what is full platter looking like.

3. Personalization
The site not only allows user to choose the features but also the card image, which can be of a memorable sunny day you enjoyed at Las Vegas. This creates an emotional connect with the consumer, an important building block in marketing.

4. Behavioral data
The data so accumulated from online behavior of consumers will go a long way in helping Capital One to understand consumer and help them design things better to command more loyalty and consumer base.

All said and done, this is one initiative a lot of marketers in cards domain will be watching out for.

The issue came to light last week when Susan Pagan’s daughter, Cathy, a fourth-grader at Red Bug Elementary School, brought home her report card and wanted to get a free Happy Meal because she earned good grades.Pagen told her daughter, “Our family does not eat at fast food chains,” Pagan said. “And, now I’m the bad guy.”

Pagan said she complained to school officials in an e-mail about the advertising and received a telephone call from Superintendent Bill Vogel. She said he told her that she was the only person who complained and he noted that McDonald’s offers some healthy alternatives.

One of the very novel ways to involve your customer with your brand/ product is to come out with something interesting that most of your intended customers will like to be involved in and then bring yourself in. Many companies do it by way of “Issued in public interest” or “For more information on this (non product) contact us at xyz” which may happen for some awareness or plain virals. Such methods do not call out at the customers showing off their features or benefits, in fact its mainly not about the product at all, it caters to the peripheral persuasion method. Even though you may not be going for the product/service but still you may end up ‘consuming’ it.

This idea bird has pecked Lufthansa (Airlines) also and as a result it has launched RumorTravels, a campaign which highlights the prevailing stereotypes about countries around the world. We all have such stereotypes for the countries, something that we have been hearing or reading since childhood like many of my friends whom I met during my French exchange program thought that many people in India still travel by elephants! (and I affirmed some, telling them that I have a pet elephant which I got as a gift when I turned eighteen, the age when one gets a driving license in India). Then I have heard a lot about the Italian gentlemen pinching the bottoms of damsels, Paris being a city where people are just lost in romance 24X7! These are the things that “You’ll never know if you don’t go.“, as summed by the tagline of the campaign. In several videos, countries such as Sweden, Germany and France are imagined by would be travelers.

To pep up the viewership and following, there’s also a contest which encourages people to submit rumors about a foreign country in the form of a video or a story for chance to win two round trip tickets from the U.S. to anywhere in Europe. I reached a bit too late for the contest, but still the results are coming.