Think BIG

In last week's lecture we discussed a very interesting topic that affects us all a lot in our daily lives and will continue to gain even more influence in our daily business lives. 

We are talking about big data. Big data describes the systematic use of the increasing amount of data gathered from all areas to define certain processes and predictable developments. The goal of big data is to provide relevant in-time information to the user.

Important aspects of big data are the data volume, the velocity of data being generated, the variety of the data, and finally the veracity of data insuring data quality.
The biggest issue concerning big data is the data protection of private information.

But what kind of data do we create every single day? To whom and why are these data of interest?

Our own interests can be derived very easily form what we do on the internet. If we for example read the news using our smartphones and are surveyed over a period of time, the data we create will soon show in which topics we are interested the most.

If we are on the road and check the news or look at advertisement which is tailored according to our interests or even make a purchase, our data reveals where we are at the moment we did this, what time it was, and if we make a purchase the data will also show our credit card history, which reveals what we have bought with it before.

If we google something, no matter if with or without an account, Google is able to analyse the things we search for and then adapt the advertisement according to our search. Spotify or Amazon are further examples of companies that use data we actively searched for to make new suggestions for us according to our past preferences. Therefore they do not only use our past data, but also data of other users. This way Amazon can for example suggest to buy the matching phone case for our new mobile phone we ordered, because other people normally ordered these products simultaneously.

Informations about our body are very popular data. There are many different apps that can help us measure different things. For example our blood pressure, or heartbeat, if we are allergic to some products, our weight, or how active we are during a normal day.
All these kind of informations can be for example of interest for an insurance company, because they can see the needs of their customers to adapt their complementary insurances.

There are a lot of movement data, with which it is possible to locate us all day long. Our smartphones for example leave an indirect trace when they connect form one mobile communications antenna to the next, or when we use a GPS function, and we are even traced over security cameras that are installed in a lot of places. These data can be especially useful for predicting traffic jams on the roads or other related information to the movement of people. (Einstein 2014)

All these informations are helpful for businesses to better direct their marketing efforts to our needs and interests. There are several big companies that collect all kind of data about us. Such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Youtube. The amount of data that is uploaded to these platforms every second is insane and seems very unreal to us. On the website “Internet in Real-Time” you can see the extend of data uploaded on the internet. For example, in the first 5 seconds on this website Facebook already has 2’315 new posts, Youtube has 10 hours of new video material, and Amazon sold 255 items. All together 128’600 GB have been created in only 5 seconds! By the time we reach 1 minute, the amount of data has already reached 1'354'440 GB. 

Although so many companies can take advantage of big data, there are also some issues arising.

The problem that seems rather obvious is that big data also needs a lot of space and capacity to analyse the data. The company generating big data needs to think of where they want to store the data, how they can be used, and how they should be analysed.

Another issue we experience with big data is that the data can be biased for some firms, as it may lead us to interpret the data so that we get the solution we want to, as in any other statistical measure. We may also make our decisions too fast and before finishing analysing all the data we collected. This can lead to a false conclusion. Too much data can therefore misguide us and make it more difficult for us to find the right solution to a problem.

(Network World 2015) 

Best of Swiss App

Every year an event takes place in Switzerland to evaluate the best Swiss Application developments. It is an initiative of Simsa (Swiss Internet Industry Association). Their goal is to create transparency whitin the Swiss App branch. They set quality standards and want to put gain more focus for the young, promising business sector. Best of Swiss App is one of the most acknowledged competitions in the field of App'onomy, which refers to the businesses which engage in application development. (Best of Swiss App, 2015)

Best of Swiss App: http://bestofswissapps.ch/media/cms_page_media/2014/8/13/bosa-logo-2014.jpg

This year UBS Paymit got elected to be the best Swiss Buisness App. It is a free application, which allows people to safely and quickly transfer money to friends and family throughout Switzerland. It doesn't matter at which bank you have your bank account, all you need is a smartphone. Paymit was developed by SIX, a company that engages in cashless payments for years. (Paymit, 2015) Paymit currently counts 130'000 downloads in Switzerland. (UBS, 2015)

UBS Paymit: https://microsites.ubs.com/paymit/files/UPM/assets/images/en/start/packshot_microsite_send-Screen_CHF32_en_@2x_R.png

More really innovative applications can be discovered on the ranking by Best of Swiss Apps.

Can you see it too?

Are you thinking of getting new furniture for your apartment, but are not sure how they will all fit together? Or are you thinking of getting a new couch, but are worried how it will match the rest of your furniture?

The IKEA catalogue app using augmented reality will make it possible to show furniture from an IKEA catalogue as it will look like in your apartment. To do so you have to place the catalogue on the floor at the spot where you want your new couch to go. Then you point your smartphone towards the catalogue and your video camera will show the room as it is with the additional new couch in the spot where the catalogue lies. You can now see if the couch will fit and if it looks like you expected it to. (Zeit Online, 2014)

Augmented reality is changing the world as we know it. In augmented reality we see the real world with supplementary digital content in form of sound, video, graphics, or GPS data. In contrast, a virtual world, which we are already more familiar with, only shows us a fictive reality, replacing the real world with a simulation.

Another example for augmented reality besides letting furniture magically appear in your apartment is the way it can be used in automobiles. A projector in the dashboard can project information such as speed, on to the windscreen. The information can be projected on exactly the spot where it is needed so that the driver does not have to look away from the road anymore as often as he has to do now.
For example, indicators for a change of direction will be seen on the road or floating directly in front of the road we want to turn into. Augmented reality can also help drivers to stay within the lane, as the boarders are illuminated with red marks at night. (Zeit Online, 2014)

For a marketing purpose augmented reality will play a big role, as customers can interact with the world around them.

Amazon for example has brought out its first smartphone called Firephone which offers a function called Firefly that tries to identify objects which can be bought on Amazon. This way, when a customer takes a picture of friends in a nice garden, the smartphone might recognize the flower pots and ask the user if he directly wants to buy them for his own garden. Maybe the smartphone also recognizes a friend’s jumper in the online store and suggest it to the user in the right size. This way impulsive purchases are encouraged at a very high level. (Zeit Online, 2014)

Augmented reality will also change our shopping experience a lot, as customers for example can try on the clothes on a screen and flic through the product range much faster than when searching the whole store for a matching skirt or top like the lady in the video. (Youtube)

NFC - Come closer!

NFC, Near Field Communication, is today’s topic which we were inspired to write about by the very interesting guest lecture of Mr Hirt from Swiss Digital AG. 
NFC is a technology that allows to transport information securely over short distances from one mobile device to another. By engaging in this mobile transmission of data with their smartphones, customers can take an interactive role by viewing customized rich media, receiving customized special offers, share experiences and of course commit direct purchases. 

This might sound familiar to some of you, as QR (Quick Response) codes work in a similar way. The difference is that to use QR codes an app has to be downloaded first which is no longer necessary for NFC, as users can connect directly by tapping or holding the smartphone close to another phone, a credit card reading device, or against a sticker code with NFC data. 

Sticker indicating availability of NFC

QR Code

For marketing NFC offers some advantages over QR, as besides providing more content it also serves as a tool to track consumer behaviour and preferences.
The most astonishing characteristic of NFC for a marketing purpose though, we thought, was that sales promotions could be directly sent to a smartphone of a customer standing right in front of the product. If we were standing in front of for example shoes, our smartphone might receive a special offer which lets us know that we will have a 20% price reduction on shoes in the next 30min. We will therefore be more indulged to make an instant purchase.
Another advantage of NFC is the quick payments we can make by using our phone. The process is easy, as it works the same way as using a credit card. Advantages of using our smartphone also as our wallet is that we always have an overview of our balance, get an electronic receipt, and can transfer money much easier and faster. 

Two good examples of using our smartphone as a wallet are google wallet and the Post Finance app which we were introduced to by our second guest lecturer Mr. Fuhrer. from Post Finance.
With all these advantages our smartphone can offer us, from using it as a credit card to getting immediate and customized advertisements, we are convinced it will replace our wallets very soon.

Smelling the future

This week we discovered something very new to us: a device which makes it possible to send our friends different scents from our mobile phone!

The oPhone makes it possible. You first have to buy the oNotes device which can contain different oChips that carry the various scents in them and download the app oNotes on to your phone and you are ready to go.
The oChips work like ink cartridges for our printers, only that they carry different aromas instead of different colours. The first generation of oChips included three scent families: coffee, foodie, and memory. Once they are inside the oNotes device the scents can be mixed to over 300’000 unique aroma combinations.

You can now send pictures to your friends and tell them what the for example pizza on your picture smells like and they can receive this scent over their oNotes device. 

Thanks to this technology, we can enter a whole new world of sharing sensory experiences. This will also bring lots of new opportunities for digital marketing. For example we could imagine a perfumery that has an online shop can now add the scent of each perfume to the matching picture and the customers can smell the different scents at home and easily decide which perfume to buy.

Other online shops will also be more able to influence customer behaviour through scents and make their web sites more interactive by letting their customers test different scents.

We are both very excited to see where this invention will take us and what impacts it will exactly have on digital marketing. 

From autonomous cars and digital doctors

One very interesting topic of our first lecture in Digital Marketing was disruptive innovations.  

Disruptive innovations are inventions that, as the name suggests, disrupt or even destroy something. They can change the market they enter dramatically, by being for example better or cheaper than existing products. 

Let’s have a look at some products that will have such a great impact on us and change our lives in the near future. 

One example of a disruptive innovation that we discussed in class were autonomous vehicles such as the google car that provides us with a vision of cars driving people from one place to another without any effort from their passengers. This car could be the trigger of a new business model, in which it will no longer be necessary to own a car. The only thing you will need is an App to order a car to the place you need it and let it drive you to where you want to go. Further, the driver saves valuable time by not having to concentrate on the road, which offers us various advantages.

Google car

Specialists assume that it will take no longer than one or two decades until we will be confronted with this technology in our day to day life. Until now, most of us have only seen the google car, which is the pioneer in this autonomous car industry, but not a very attractive looking model.
But we have many other well-known car manufacturers that are starting to create their own autonomous car. Audi, VW and Mercedes are just a few examples.  Considering the above mentioned advantages arising from not having to concentrate on the road. Mercedes has a car planned, with side panels that could display information, social media, or other applications on it.
If you can already picture yourself in such a futuristic car, what would you want to do with this additional time? 

Inside an autonomous mercedes

Autonomous mercedes

Another field that offers great potential for disruptive innovations is the health and fitness industry. There are already many Apps on the market that collect, report, and respond to information from the user’s own body and transfer them mostly to the user’s smartphone or tablet. The earliest type of applications could for example count our steps or recognize when we were asleep. Today’s technology makes it possible to go much further, by for example measuring our glucose level, emotional state, temperature, sleep patterns, pulse, alcohol level, weight, blood pressure, and much more.

There are even technologies that can help treat ADHD and autism by measuring attention and focus through eye tracking over the tablets’ camera or even stimulate the brain to block pain receptors for patients with chronic conditions. It is quite realistic that soon these technologies will lead to a revolution in the health care system, allowing patients to become active participants in diagnosis, treatment and preventive care. This kind of revolution could make it possible to live longer in our own houses without needing home care. Also we could push the need to move to a retirement home further away.  

Having just recently read the Interview with Mr Keen, these innovations once again leave us thinking. Are all these technological and digital innovations a blessing or a curse?  

Andrew Keen about the digital revolution

We've all heard it a million times, it's never the question if you use it, the question is how often you do so. We believe the interview with Andrew Keen is in many ways about this problem.

People only talk about how the internet is destroying businesses and jobs, but they often forget how it opens the world for others. Small shops are able to sell their products worldwide, people from all over the world can access knowledge, unknown people can show their talents on youtube and then get an offer for an audition, the housewife can create a cooking blog and start a career if she does really well. Of course these success stories are rare but the internet certainly plays an important role when it comes to education.

A disruptive innovation like airbnb brings new competition in the market of overnight-stays. However we also believe that it is another wonderful example of how synergies from people all over the world can be used. Including mid-income people, Mr Keen claims to be suffering so badly.

On the other hand it is the sad truth that technological developments replace human workforce. Let's just think of the Migros and Coop self check-out system. Why would a mother of three still be having that part-time job at Migros in a few years if her skills can be replaced by machines? Right, there is no reason. The problem however doesn't lie in the technological advantage. These companies give customers a choice to either queue and have a quick social interaction with the cashier or just operate a machine and leave. Sadly many people would choose the second. They are always short in time, stressed and certainly not willing to wait until their highness can pay - and that's the real problem. We could even go as far as calling it a social decease. People mostly just think about themselves and not about others. We hardly see people interacting on trains. Everyone seems to be to obsessed with their smartphones, checking e-mails, facebook news or the most recent instagram stream. We all forget to socialise properly: face-to-face.

The internet, social media and technological developments certainly enrich our world, if we use them responsibly. We believe it will take a while until people start to realise that not the technological advancement is the problem but their very own behaviour. And maybe, just maybe, before mankind realises we will create a robot so intelligent that will destroy the human race.