According to a survey
done during 2007, children ages 2-17 are exposed between 12 and 21 times per
day or about 4400 times to 7600 times
per year to food advertising. On the other side, they are exposed to only 47 to
164 times per year to fitness or nutrition service ads.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled among children ages 2 to 5
(5.0% to 12.4%) and ages 6 to 11 (6.5% to 17.0%). In teens ages 12 to 19,
prevalence rates have tripled (5.0% to 17.6%). Obesity in childhood places
children and youth at risk.
Today’s children, ages 8 to 18, consume multiple types of
media (often simultaneously) and spend more time (44.5 hours per week) in front
of computer, television, and game screens than any other activity in their
lives except sleeping. Research has found strong associations between increases
in advertising for non-nutritious foods and rates of childhood obesity.
So what do I propose…
The FCC mandated a rule that say that all television sets
with screens 33 inch and up must be equipped with a feature to block the display
of television programming based on its rating.
This technology is called the V-chip. and
it enables you to block certain programming types.
A simple solution might be to mandate the rating of ads as
well, and use the V-CHIP technology already in TV sets to enable parents to
block certain types of ads for the sake of the kids, and judging from myself
for my own sake as well.
And here the kicker, fast thinking cable companies (or Google)
can take advantage of that newly created dead ad time and use that as inventory
to sell other types of ads stored on the cable box, targeting them based on specific
consumer preferences. Presumably, this targeting process can be used as a completely
new method of targeting consumers for all TV ads, by enabling people to opt out
from ads they do not like or need.
A win, win, win, win. Kids, parents and the whole nation win
by eating less and promoting health. Consumers win by getting to choose ads
(or opt them out), advertisers win by showing correct ads to those who are
interested hence increasing conversion rates. Cable companies win by creating a
new, better-targeted advertising model. Who losses? You tell me.
Here is something I did not see at CES 2009, well, I should say did not see yet. As I was watching Star Trek over the years it became clear to me that those programs can provide a glimpse to the future if not even forge the future by igniting creativity among other creative people.
We know that scientists are working on teleportation, (“beam me up Scotty”) they even made progress in the past years and managed to show that it is theoretically possible. But why go that far, we all use cell phones, they started big, morphed to mimic the shape of Captain Kirk’s communicator (the flip phone) and they are now becoming smaller and smaller almost like those of Star trek voyager comm badges.
All we have to do to find new ideas is look closer and permutate some of the visuals and gadgets used at those shows. And there are plenty of them.
What caught my attention was how Star Trek people were using their “iPhones” (well not really iPhones more like their “iPod touch”. The key difference between what we have today as iPod iPhone, Android or Palm Pre and what they have used on the show is the fact that theirs was not really owned by anyone specific. They were tossing them around as if they were yellow pads.
This is how I came to the conclusion that given the correct method as depicted later in this post one can build what I call a Multi Tenant Portable Device. I started working on the concept way back, and finally decide to file it as a patent on December 4th 2008.
The Objective
The objective is to enable multiple users some temporary users to use any portable device nearby with full access to all personal data as if it was your own device, and without compromising your own privacy or the privacy of other users (I call tenants) on the device.
Imagine that you can get full access to all your personal data such as e-mail address book, phone numbers, calendar and messages using someone else’s phone or portable device when your own device is not nearby or not operational from some reason like luck of battery juice, reception or any other reason.
Imagine sitting in front of a TV and reading your e-mails, using your kid’s iPhone or even your smart universal TV remote.
As portable devices become pervasive they could be thrown in the house everywhere much like our old cordless phones. Today, as oppose, to my home cordless phone which is everywhere, when I hear my cell phone I need to find my own cell phone first in order to accept the call. With this invention you could be using any available cell phone around you to pick up your call.
Imagine a world or a corporate environment where people exchange PDA-like devices as if they were writing pads or a printed document, and then leave that device around for others to use, without losing any privacy of personal data.
Using this invention, all the above can become a reality. To say the truth it is not even complicated which in my mind makes it a perfect idea, simply simple and powerful.
Here is how
Today, cell phones have a SIM card that defines the phone personality, kind of a serial number that provides the network ID to which the network can assign your phone number and attach billing information. Today, it is not simple to replace the SIM card, and on iPhone almost impossible. The address book, email settings and other data objects are usually stored locally on the phone’s flash memory. As it stands the experience of using someone else’s phone or PDA is a not a pleasant thought and often feared by the phone owner from privacy reasons. It is sufficient to see my College kid objections to his teenage brother using his iPhone, to understand that privacy is a real issue on those portable devices.
Now what if we could make that SIM card or SIM card analogy well seamless? In much the same way that my mail is not on my PC but rather on a networked mail like g-mail, so can my address book be, my calendar be, my YouTube movies be, my browser preferences be and so on. All I need is to point the Phone (or the Device) to the correct well encrypted on-line setting storage, and the device is temporarily mine.
Some of the above settings’ data is already on-line or replicated for backup or as a synchronization point, but it is not made available on-line to any device I desire, it is for my own devices to use, my own Google account, own address book and so on.
In many cases local storage is not a dirty word, think of it as cash memory for personal data. The problem is that it is not segregated & encrypted per user. So a temporary user can easily get access to personal information stored on the device, while pretending to use that for something else.
Once I have my settings available on-line and from my segregated local storage I can see how iPhones or PDA or iPod Touch or Plam Pre or any iPhone-like smart devices would use a password, or a finger print reader, or even an RFID reader with a tag that a user would carry in his/her pocket to be able to re-define the phone current tenant and all of those tenants relevant settings.
To use such a device I would enter my ID, or place my finger on the device, or just touch it and retrieve all my settings (from the network or local storage on the device), and gain access to my address book, my preferences, My Music, My Movies, my phone calls and even my device desktop and wall paper. In fact as soon as I touch the phone or device I should not be able to distinguish between that phone or device and my own device or phone (operationally speaking, taken in consideration form factors and UI capabilities).
As soon as I “let go”, (if I am not on an active phone call), and the phone goes to sleep mode, the device, using some defined policy, revert back to its original “owner” (or default user) settings.
Different “let go” policies may be used like a tenant registering on another device, or a tenant proactively logging out from the device, or just not touching it, or simple timeout. When this happens the device can forget the tenant personal data, or store it encrypted in a local storage in case the same tenant needs it again quickly, all according to what the tenant defined in the tenant’s personal profile.
As a user of such device, I can now prepare a document on my way to work, assign it to the destination user, by say e-mailing it or potentially storing it locally encrypted for a specific user. As I come to work I just hand the device to the other user to read without risking unauthorized access to my personal data on the Device. All that the next user will see is his own data his own e-mails and nothing else. Could he use his own device to read it? Probably yes if I mailed it, but he just gave his own device to someone else. One can envision that there will be no more “owning” of devices, in much the same way that there is no owning of a document I just handed to you, it’s yours if you like it. Or owning will exist but sharing of and collaboration by using those multi tenant mobile devices will be more apparent.
For very sensitive data that should not hit the network, sharing specific data might be accomplished, as mentioned above, by storing the data locally with an access list for one or a plurality of users so that only the People named in the list can open the data when they have their identity entered to or identified by the phone. The data is stored locally encrypted to that trusted list of readers and does not have to leave the device.
My phone, my PDA device, even my universal remote control are now becoming a much more powerful collaboration devices, with much more diverse set of uses and applications almost like what we saw happening on Star Trek Voyager. It shortens the distance of the users not only from the device but also from their personal data and any other public digital content out there.
If you recall on the Star Trek series the com-badge was not part of the data infrastructure of the ship, it was very personal, like a personal SIM or ID card for a person. But on many occasions, you wished one person could use someone else’s com badge to get out of dire situations. If only they thought of applying the Multi Tenant methods to the communicators they could have probably save the jobs of few actors here and there.
As mentioned the device local storage can hold group access rights and personal settings for say an enterprise, so that local data on the device can not be used outside the list of trusted users without erasing all data that might be stored on the device. The local storage can also store an updated copy of all the local users’ settings for the occasions where the device is not connected to a network.
If the device shared is also a phone and the phone is now used by a temporary user, phone calls to the original device owner or other guests on the device might be accepted in one implementation as call waiting if the phone is used at that instance when another call is directed to the same phone, while the display can show the called person ID as well as the caller ID. When not on a call an incoming call can trigger a vocally “called person ID” so the correct person can know to pick up the phone to answer.
Looking at it from the network side, when a temporary user is logging into a shared device the calls for the temporary user or users will be directed to the shared device. If implemented efficiently this process can take place even when I hear my phone ring from a far and I want to instantly become a tenant on say my wife’s phone or any suitable device in my vicinity to pick that call.
The Personalization Process
Personalization methods are not limited to, but could use an apparatus such as a Finger Print reader, image recognition using a camera on the device, voice print identification, RFID tag or be as simple as a password on a phone that was setup to accept a specific guests, or as simple as a username and password the first time a new guest is introduced to the phone.
Basic Personalization and Personalization Persistence Process
The Personalization data has to be made to fit different devices. It means that the personalization data of a user or guest is stored in some tagged metadata format that can be interpreted and converted differently by every multi-tenant device to match that device’s specific setup and capabilities. If the device supports only e-mail and not phone calls than obviously the phone information and redirection process will not be used and the calls for the new guest tenant will not be directed to that phone. SMS or other push mode notifications for instance might be directed to that device via e-mail if the device supports push e-mail and not SMS and if the user chooses that type of behavior.
Persistence of one or more guests on a device must be handled as well. Persistence is a bit different than what is widely known as presence today. Presence is an indication that I am currently actively using a specific device or software and usually indicate a “non-present” status when the user has not touched the keyboard or has not responded to a call for action for some time. On a phone for instance, the user may not have used the phone functionality for a long period but he/she is still present to accept calls, SMS or/and voicemail indications even when he/she is not able to specifically answer a phone call at a given situation (like in a movie theater) or when he/she has not touched the keyboard for a long period. This means that the fact that a specific user is now guest or a tenant on a device must be persistent, even when normal presence may indicate otherwise.
As mentioned there may be few policies that could be implemented by the device owner or a guest regarding the persistence of a guest instance on a device. For instance a phone can be set to accept a guest phone call as long as the guest did not logout, or as long as the guest did not log in from another device. An automatic log-out can be implemented so the fact that the user is now a tenant on another phone can indicate to the network to automatically log that guest out from any previous devices the user was logged into as a guest.
For this system to work for example for normal calls and SMS, a forwarding action of SMS or calls must be accessible from any remote device even when the device is not on the same network and also from any internet connected device. In the existing cellular networks if you want to forward calls to another phone while traveling, you must remember to do that from your phone before you leave the country, or you will not be able to do that later. VoIP networks today enable that forwarding anytime from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection and a web browser.
A simple personalization process would look like this:
Note: this concept was filed as a patent, and the author is open to discuss licensing.
Many VCs and Entrepreneurs struggle with the problem of predicting when to invest money and time into a new idea and when to pass. Some just guess, others invest in people and passion. I decided to try and see if we can analyze and find some success predictors. A method often used by investors include a mental simulation that assumes the investor is the target audience (even if it is a product for kids) which will usually end up with one conclusion “I would not use it, why would anyone else”. When in doubt, they will say let’s wait and see if it gets some traction. This is a good test but if the product gets traction without marketing budget, you may not need the investment, or the valuation would be different.
Entrepreneurs often get excited an in love with an idea and forget the basics such as the business model. As a frequent visitor to the NY Tech Meetup forum I can tell you that the forum organizer banned the Business Model question simply because, many entrepreneurs had no idea what it is.
To make that process a bit simpler I have decided to do a summary of my non-scientific observations of some internet product features that can be used as predictors for success. As a reference I chose to look generally on some successes such as ICQ, Skype, MySpace / Facebook, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia and try to ask the question “what traits do they all have in common?”
I came up with the following list of “success” factors (traits or features) that seem to repeat themselves on the more popular applications and websites. I have also added some of my own experience to the mixture.
Let's start with those:
Viral or Social Characteristics
Simple & Reliable
No installation
User Participation (UGC)
“Usefulness
Business Model
Marketing and Budget
Investment Requirement
Viral or Social Characteristics
If a product is more useful to you when your friends have it, it means that it poses the viral trait. For instance what can you do with ICQ or Skype by yourself? Maybe talk to strangers. Yet, when your friends have it, you are really thriving.
If we look at my MySpace, the need to show people your new psychedelic page background drives you to ask others to join in.
If you have designed your product with a viral approach, good, if not, try to ride on top of an existing Social Network that has strong communication tools, so that it would very simple for a user to tell a friend, see what I found.
LinkedIn for instance has Poor communication tools, they adopted the “Don’t e-mail me, I will call you” approach whereas Facebook did the opposite with features such as Poke, Status, and Simple internal mail.
The use of OpenSocial API (led by Google) will enable new application to get closer to the Holy Grail of interoperability and Viral Distribution with the mantra of “write once run many” (on many Social Networks that is).
Simple & Reliable
Not much to say here, the product should Simply Work (Like Skype) vs. for instance MSN Messenger or other SIP phones that at least initially suffered from all kind of NAT (networking and fire wall) issues. I would say that new products should be designed with security in mind and work behind corporate firewalls. It seems that people now work from home, and “shop” from the office.
The GUI must be as simple as possible, like twitter; it should work on every OS, and on any browser. I know it is not always simple to do, yet it is a good design consideration, that can be achieved over time.
No installation
Every installation that a user is required to do is a friction point, even Skype in my opinion may have been more popular if it did not require setup for the first second.
My recommendation is to use Flash when possible (if a web page browser based technology is not sufficient). There are new similar or Flash like next-generation environment but it is better to stick to those already deployed with end users. The most popular applications such as G-mail, Facebook, MySpace, don’t require installation.
Sometimes the audience you need for Business Development is different than the one really using your product. Skype Developer Program manager said in a developer session in NY “Make sure your application can run on a Mac” so more people in skype will know about you.
User Participation (UGC)
It makes sense, that applications, which let users share private or public information, get more attention. First the users who placed the information keep getting back to update, or share more. Second it provides for an incentive to tell others about it.
In a way it feeds our basic curiosity to see what other people expose and our need to be exposed. In other words the basic human Voyeurism and Exhibitionism. Good examples for that are Q&A sites, Facebook and MySpace.
It turns out that UGC it is also good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which dramatically contributes to the economics of the site.
SEO In general is something that needs to start from day one, from the point when you register the domain name, or buy one that has traffic, and on, on every page that comes up on the website.
Usefulness
Usefulness or Utility is hard to predict, what useful for me may not be useful for others and vise versa. I would never think that emoticons will be useful in any way, yet almost two Million users of Zlango think otherwise. When Skype came out people might say why I need another Messenger/Yahoo/AIM/ICQ/… well apparently me2 is not always useless and if it always works with better audio quality, it is useful.
A product is also useful if fills a personal social need like, promoting global knowledge, by writing articles in Wikipedia or a need for personal promotion by writing a personally related factual page in Wikipedia. Fun is another form of utility if people can derive fun of a product it is useful for that purpose.
So how do you predict if a product or a webpage is useful, I guess by asking as many people as you can, or finding a specific need that the product covers. One way to try and predict is by using the Kawasaki map of Uniqueness vs. Value.
Business Model
There are many business models that one can come up with, yet the most successful are Ad Revenue which is based on traffic or Eyeballs, Recurring Subscription fees as done with Linked-In, and WOW (World of Warcraft) and so on. The last is selling non tangible replicable products such as Music, Videos and things like Software Download. A type product that makes you money while you sleep.
Commission based models that are driven by paid clicks (and not by organic traffic) are getting hard to support with the climbing prices of popular keywords. In some popularlucrative domains (sex for instance) a click can cost more than $10, imagine how much money has to be made per transaction to get the net revenue balance the cost of the click divided by the conversion rate. The party receiving the gross revenue is the one that need to support the ad, not the party receiving the commission, and this is a hard situation to create.
Marketing
Never leave marketing to pure luck. The more successful companies (leaving out those that got lucky or had other traits working for them) started with nice marketing budget. They started with their SEO activities, such as creating content, creating back links, grass root buzz creating activities, Ads, Videos, TV commercials, radio commercials, free “minutes”, and more. A good young marketing person is an asset worth having on board. Pure luck is simply to hard to manufacture.
Having said that a startup need to make sure it allocates sufficient funding for marketing purpose.
Investment Requirements
A product or a web site is not built in one day, it takes time and time needs funding. As an entrepreneur I would recommend that the first Angel or VC round will take in account R&D and Marketing. From an entrepreneur point of view if you finish the product and you can not market it to create traction; you will not be able to raise the next round. Investor place no value on Internet technology those days, as sophisticated as it might be.
An investor on the other hand would argue that it is better to raise money for marketing after the product is proven, or has gone few improvement phases. This obviously seems to minimize the risk, and drives the company to make improvements trying to make the product get traction without marketing.
I say, raise the money up-front. Spend on marketing only after you have done some improvement phases. Don’t get caught with a product everyone says is good, but has no traction to prove them right.
I will conclude by stating that not every application or website encompasses all the ingredients from day one, the more it has from the get go the better its chances are to succeed. You must keep adding the ingredients and funding in order to move from the initial success to the ultimate exit opportunity. If you are stuck without one or the other, start writing Blogs :).
