I love it when companies create "future visions" videos - like this one from Microsoft, or these from Penguin (ebooks) and Goab (TV). This morning, I came across one from Corning...and it is spectacular!
Corning is a glass manufacturer, probably best known for it's Gorilla Glass that Apple uses to make their iPhones and iPads ultra tough. But as you can see in the video, Corning wants to do much more than make Gorilla glass (see video below).
One thing I particularly like is that, unlike most other future vision, Corning seems to 'get it'. Most other brands seem to have this idea that we will have separate computers in every room. A computer in your bathroom mirror, in your refrigerator, in your living room table, in your closet door, etc.
But just imagine the nightmare of having to manage all those separate computers. Not to mention, how would you persuade app developers to create separate apps for your bathroom mirror? It is hard enough just to convince developers to make apps for Windows Phone 7.
It is the old time thinking, back from the days where computers weren't connected in a mobile form factor. But Corning 'get it' because they are saying: No, you will not have a computer in every room. You will have a display everywhere, but it's your tablet or smartphone that is powering them.
Finally! This is exactly what the future will be like (in my opinion).
Удобные штучки На сайте вы найдете полезную информацию о тех вещах, которые реально облегчают нашу жизнь - будь то солнцезащитные очки или коммуникатор последней модели. Это не очередной гламурный сайт. Это портал обо всем, что делает нашу жизнь удобной! Присоединиться →
I often talk about how you need to be everywhere and not restrict your product to a market. We all know how annoying it is when we hear about something on Twitter, but are then not allowed to buy it because we live in the wrong country.
The internet is global by default, and 'local' is no longer a country or a geographic area. Local is your dedicated fans compared to people who are just mildly interested. If you want to launch a product for a limited audience, you don't limit it to a country, you limit it to your dedicated fans first, and everyone else second.
But sometimes I do understand why companies don't want to play in the global world. It's a nightmare, because each country that you have to deal with believes that it should make their own rules and get a cut of your profit.
I don't mind paying taxes. But I do mind paying taxes to a country that I have nothing to do with.
Let me illustrate the problem:
As you might know, I am self-publishing my books on Amazon, which is fairly easy:
First you have to go through the grueling process of writing the book. This takes many, many months, part of which requires you to go mad for at least one of these months.
You then have to spend a couple of weeks in ebook hell, as you try to convert your cleverly made book containing video, links, and interactivity to a format that can be read on the Kindle (which BTW you can't).
Then you have to spend 10 minutes uploading your ebook file to Amazon, type in the title, description, and set your price. It is very easy to do! (far easier than submitting something to Apple).
Within 24 hours, Amazon will do a quick check of your book and put it up for sale in their store, for which they take a 30% cut of whatever price you set.
This sounds like a pretty good deal. You earn 70%, which is about a billion times more than what you would get from a traditional publisher (although I might be exaggerating just a bit).
Take my book, "The Shift. From Print To Digital...and Beyond!" When I published this book on Amazon, I decided to set a really good price of $8.79, meaning I would earn about $6 per book sold. Sounds good, right?
But, that's nowhere near what I actually make - and here is why:
First is the problem of sales tax. In the US, my book is indeed priced at $8.79, but if you are from Denmark, Amazon is required to add Danish sales tax - which is a staggering 25%.
The result is that the same book is suddenly $12.41.
For those of you who are good at math, you will quickly realize that comparing $12.41 to $8.79 is not actually an increase of 25% - it is an increase of 41%.
I asked Amazon, "WTH are you doing that for?" and they only answer they gave me was that it is because of fees in relation to EU.
So here I am. I live in Denmark and I'm a Danish citizen, but while I can sell my books to my followers in the US for $8.79, my neighbor has to pay 41% extra, just because I am selling my book from a server in the US.
The sales tax doesn't actually change how much I make, but it has a serious effect on how many people who are willing to buy my books. My book sale in Europe is about 5% of what it is in the US.
But it doesn't stop here. Yesterday, I received a letter from Amazon with the title, "Foreign Person's U.S. Source Income Subject to Withholding." It stated that Amazon had withheld 30% of my profit as US income Tax. Don't forget that I am also paying Danish Income tax, so basically I'm now being double taxed.
On top of all this, Amazon is paying me via a check in USD, which I have to cash manually in my local bank while paying a steep fee for exchanging US dollars into Danish Kroner.
The result of all this is outright scary:
Of the $12.41 that my neighbor has to pay, I only get $2.39. The world's Governments get 58%, my bank get's 0.2%, and Amazon gets the rest.
Why did I publish my books on Amazon again? I'm not making any money from it. It just goes to everyone else!
As I started out saying, I don't mind paying taxes. But I do mind being punish so severely for trying to play nice in a global world. Why am I paying 41% in sales tax, when the Danish sales tax is only 25%? Why should I pay income taxes in two different countries, when I only live in one?
Arguably, I could try to apply for a US Tax Identification Number - a TIN, which is actually an EIN. This involves a lot of complicated forms and sending them what they call a wet-ink mail. I have no idea what a wet-ink mail is. Not only do I not own a printer, but all the printers I did own in the past outputted paper with the ink already dried. Maybe it's some kind of bureaucratic process that involves soaking the form in a bucket of water before sending it.
But even so, this would only exempt me from paying US income tax (maybe), it would not change anything about the abnormally high sales tax.
Again, the only reason for this insanity is that Amazon is a US company.
Another and much better solution seems to be to sell my books directly, using a EU payment provider. I looked into this and here is the result.
Using Amazon, most of my profit is being eaten up by taxes and fees. Mostly because I am a non-US citizen using a US company to sell to people globally.
But if I moved the shop to a EU server (selling direct), using a European payment provider, I would still have to pay sales tax for people in the EU. But while the sales tax using Amazon is 41%, it would only be 25% using a European provider. I would also still have to pay income tax, but only to one country.
I can not only reduce my price to the original $8.79 I wanted for my book, but I can also reduce the price substantially for people outside EU - and still make more money.
And, I can still sell my books to everyone in the world. The only difference is that the shop is no longer handled by a US company. This whole tax madness is just a way for the Government to punish me for being a Danish citizen doing business in the US.
I don't blame Amazon for any of this. They are burdened by this as much as I am. The people we should blame are the world's Governments, who are still living in a disconnected world confined by borders. Each one trying to add their own rules, their own level of bureaucracy, their own import and export fees, and their own taxes.
In their eyes, I'm exporting my book to the US, and then importing it back to Europe. In my eyes, I'm selling it to everyone from the internet using a cloud based provider.
The result speaks for itself. Instead of having a competitive world where people would thrive, we now live in a never ending financial crisis. A world where people don't have enough money to pay their bills because everything is too expensive to buy.
I don't know what I'm going to do about this yet. I might just decide to ignore it. The reason is that I already have a much better solution - my subscription service. When you buy a subscription for Baekdal Plus, not only do you get all my content for $5/month, you also get all my books for free.
And on top of that, you are dealing with me directly and that means no Amazon, no fees, and no double taxes. So do me a favor and subscribe to Baekdal Plus. It's much better value for the money - for both of us!
You might have noticed all the fuss in recent weeks over news aggregation. It is caused by a new site, the Curators Code, which is trying to promote a common standard for curation and aggregation, but just like everyone else, they seem to completely miss what aggregation means in the connected world.
Remember back in November, when John ST put out a video that the future of advertising agencies was to be a catvertising agency?
The message was clear. In the future, cat videos would exceed all other forms of content. And we laughed and laughed and laughed, because...well...it was funny as there was some truth to that. But nobody took them them seriously, not even John ST. It was all just a good joke. Haha!
Except for the people working at Columbia Sportswear. Somehow they actually took this whole thing seriously, and the result is an advertising campaign firmly planted in the world of catvertising.
We might all think this is just a big joke (and it is), but I would not be surprised if this video is going to turn out to be Columbia Sportswear's most popular video on YouTube. After only two weeks, it already has 73,000 views putting in the top 10 (and making it their second most popular campaign).
Of course, there is a catch. Yes, it's easy to get tons of views by dumping down your message to popular internet memes, but it also reflects on your identity, which reflects on the type of customers you get. The cat video is mostly harmless (and funny), but then they also posted videos of people eating food soaked in sweat (as part of the same campaign). I don't want to connect with that kind of brand.
Personally, I prefer videos like this amazing one from Peak Performance, but alas, it *only* has 15,000 views.
Yesterday, Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with 'The State of The News Media, An Annual Report on American Journalism'. The report itself is very interesting, but there is one change that everyone seems to miss. It is the profound change that is happening in our new multi-device world.
In the past, business decisions were usually made based on predefined marked conditions - like when a brand says it will only open up a retail shop in cities with a population of 100,000 or more. This concept is hardwired into every one of us. Until we reached a predetermined critical mass, we decide to not interact with that market.
The same happened when we started to use the internet. We would look at browser share, screen resolutions, and other features, and then decide if something was worth investing in.
And today, we see the same old market thinking when it comes to mobile devices. In Pew's report, we could find these two graphs. The first one showing how many people own more than one device (52%). And the second, how many who are regularly consuming news on more than one device (34%).
Share of people who own more than one device
Share of people who consume content on more than one device
Studies like these are immensely interesting because it tells us a lot about the shift in media (and how incredibly fast it is happening). But it is also irrelevant, because of the much more powerful trend of how we connect.
We no longer make a decision to be in a specific market. We expect any market/product to be available when we need it.
We see this with brands. In the past, it was perfectly reasonable to only open shops in your primary market, but in the connected world you don't want to confine your product to a market.
The thing that has change is how the connected world is turning our market conditions upside down. Not only is the connected world removing the limitations of the past, it is dramatically changing people's expectations of your availability.
We expect that if we connect with you, we should also be able to engage with your brand and product.
The same is now happening with our devices. In the past, each device was seen as a separate object with separate capabilities. But that is no longer the case. If you want to read an email, you can do that on whatever device you have.
This has caused a profound change in how people interact with their devices. In the old days, the devices we used were explicitly linked to an action:
I will use my phone to call a friend.
I will use my laptop to read an article.
I will use my TV to watch a show.
But today, because our devices are so similar, we expect to be able to use whatever device that happens to be closest to us. And the stunning result is that old user behavior of 'choosing a device' to 'do an action' has been distilled down to just 'do the action':
I will call a friend
I will read an article
I will watch a show
If you are sitting comfortable in your couch checking up on something on your phone, and a friend asks you if you have seen that product he just posted about on Facebook, you are not going to put down your phone, get out of your couch, and walk into another room to look up that picture on your laptop. You will just use whatever device that happens to be in your hands at that moment (in this case your phone).
And if you as a brand are not ready for that (i.e. if you require a desktop browser), you are working against your audience. It doesn't matter what the mobile market share happen to be. You have to be ready for people whenever they come to you, using whatever device they happen to be using.
It is the same with publishers. If you are sitting at work, working on your laptop, and a friend asks if you have read that article over at Wired, you are not going to stand up to find your bag, take out your iPad, and start the Wired app just to read it. You are going to ask, "Do you have a link?" and then expect to be able to read it on whatever device you happen to be using at that moment.
It doesn't matter what the iPad market share is. People no longer make the decision to use a specific device for a specific action. People connect, and they then expect you to honor that connection on whatever device they happen to use.
If you are not everywhere, you are not relevant!
A simple example of this is Evernote. I use Evernote every single day for jotting down notes and ideas for new articles. The reason I love to use Evernote is that it allows me to use it wherever I am, using whatever device I want - even offline.
That means that my workflow is: Get an idea, write it down!
If Evernote was an *iPad only app*, it would be completely useless to me. It would force me to go to that device every single time I had an idea. It would be a disruption of my workflow, and it would require me to focus on something else than what I am thinking about, causing me to forget parts of that idea, before I had found that I last put my iPad in my Kitchen.
The usefulness of Evernote is explicitly linked to being on every device. It doesn't matter what the mobile market share may be. If it is not everywhere, I could not use it.
The trend in the two graphs from Pew is very interesting for an analytical perspective. But the world has changed. It doesn't matter what the numbers are any longer. All you need to know is that you need to connect to whatever device that happens to be closest to your audience at any given moment.
You need to take the 'device thinking' out of the equation.
It's been a while since I published anything about 3D printers, but it is a very interesting development. In time, 3D printing is likely to lead to the replicator. A device that can recreate any physical product right inside your home.
This will lead to the same market conditions for physical products as we have today with digital ones. Just as we no longer need a thousand newspapers to write the same story, we will no longer need a thousand farmers to produce similar crop.
I wrote about this shift in the article, "The Future of News And The Replicators". It is fascinating to think about just how much the world will change once we have invented the replicator. Not just for the future potential of physical things, but also because it teaches us a lot about the shift that we see today in the digital world.
3D printing is still a long way from that future, but it is moving forward at a steady pace.
One problem we have, apart from the resolution being too low and the limitation in materials, is that it is too hard for 'normal people' to use.
Back in 2008 I wrote about Shapeways where you can upload a 3D model which they will then print for you. They have since expanded their service to also include an Etsy-type store where you can sell your own 3D printed objects, and there are some cool ones out there like this 3D printed iPad stand for $20.
You can also go out and buy a relatively cheap 3D printer yourself (there is one on Amazon for $4,449).
But the problem in both cases, is that you still have to figure out how to make the 3D model in the first place. And as we all know, 3D applications are hideously hard to use for normal people.
A couple of days ago I received an email from a startup that is planning to solve this problem. But they plan to take this a step further and make 3D printing fun for kids. They are doing it with an iPad app and trying fund it via Kickstarter.
Take a look:
I think this is a brilliant concept that has a ton of potential. Arguably, the novelty of making pottery is going to wear off fairly quickly. But imagine, for a moment, that you could create your own toys? You know, funny animals like...Mmmm...a tiger-giraffe with big lumpy feet called Flumpy :)
In this ultra-connected world, one thing that many (including myself) encourage brands to do is to be much more transparent. The act of hiding behind print advertisements simply doesn't work in a social world dominated by two-way connections.
You have to open yourself up, because social success equals the feeling of being a part of something.
So here is an idea. Why don't you live-stream your next employee meeting to everyone on the internet?
Okay, okay...I know is probably not such a good idea, but it is interesting to think about, because what is preventing you from doing it? What arguments do you have for not allowing that to happen?
Here are some of the arguments that I have heard in the past:
We don't want our competitors to know what we are doing!
This could be a very valid argument, but it's often one put forward by companies who are not doing anything that special. And companies who are competing with other companies who are also not doing anything special.
Think of it like this. When it comes to great brands, a big reason people buy their products is because of the brands themselves. If you like Nike, you don't buy a pair of sneakers from Adidas.
The brands who are afraid of their competitors are usually the type of companies who doesn't really have a brand to begin with. That is their real problem.
If what you create is the same as everyone else, then yes ...letting your competitors know before you launch is a big concern, but it is rarely a problem if what you create is unique and you are known for that.
We see the same problem, for instance, with newspapers. One suggestion that many have put forward is for newspapers to open up what kind of stories they are working on, because that invites reader participation and might lead to better informed stories.
But newspapers don't want to do that, because they know if they post an idea for a story, 100 other newspapers will steal it (which is true). But consider this, if David Pogue writes that he will review a new camera next week, it doesn't matter if 100 other newspapers steals that idea. You are not reading David Pogue's article just to hear about the camera you are reading to hear what David Pogue thinks about it.
Preventing your competitors from knowing what you are doing is only a concern when you are not unique. The problem is not your competitors the problem is with yourself.
We don't want people to see what our brand is really like
This is also a legitimate concern for many brands. The problem is that, in the past, marketing was in charge of taking your average product and creating a brand image around it that made it more than it really was.
It was a good strategy...in the 1980s. But in today's social world, people don't share your advertisements, people share your products based on how they feel about them.
If you are afraid of letting people see how you work, you have a serious problem on your hands. If your brand image doesn't reflect the spirit within the company, then you are living in the past world of branding.
The problem is not to live-stream your employee meeting the problem is that you are living a lie. You are telling people one thing, while doing another.
If there is one thing that people don't care about, it's when something is faked - and people are extremely good at identifying false brand images.
A much bigger question is, why would people care? What are you doing that would make people interested in watching you work?
There are many other examples of why brands don't want to live-stream their employee meetings, but the point is that the reason is rarely the live-stream itself, but rather problematic business practices and lackluster employee spirits.
If your brand is unique, and every employee believe in what they do, live streaming would be a great way to "open up". For instance, look at TWiT.tv. Not only are they live-streaming their shows, they are also live-streaming anything that goes on in between the shows. This sometimes leads to some awkward moments, but they great fun for the rest of us.
Now, I wouldn't recommend that you live-stream your meetings. But it is interesting to think about the things that prevent you from being open and transparent, mostly because the answers are usually shortcomings in yourself.
It's not about being fancy. It's about being real. it's about being true to what you do and it's about aligning the purpose of your company with the people who work there.
I have seen some pretty strange things when it comes to publishers blocking content, but the BBC has just taken this to the extreme. Instead of blocking everyone else, they have decided to block themselves.
Last month, BBC launched a new site called BBC Future. It is absolutely brilliant, with top notch and focused articles. I just love this new site, and if you haven't seen it yet, you should!
But there is a catch. Everyone in the world can see this site, except anyone in the UK. From England, you will instead see this:
Note: Thanks to stef for the screenshot.
The BBC, as you might know, is owned by the UK Government, which essentially means that it is owned by the citizens of UK. It's monetized, via taxes, in the form of public licensing fees and as such has to be provided openly and freely to everyone in the UK.
But because this particular site is operated by the division within the BBC in charge of international expansion, and is monetized by advertising, the BBC has to block it for everyone in the UK.
That just makes no sense. Why don't they just block the ads?
As a publisher (from Denmark), I don't understand why BBC Future isn't just removing the ads for people in the UK. You are not losing any money by allowing UK citizens to see it, all you do is to antagonize the entire UK population.
And, you are disrupting the flow of social sharing. When we share your links, we have no control over who sees it. I shared an article earlier, and one of my followers complained to me about it. You are making me look bad, because I shared a link that only some could see. It's social discrimination.
Your site is extremely interesting, and very well done. But the decision to block UK citizens is daft. Please do something about it...
I have seen some pretty strange things when it comes to geolocation blocking. But this one just boggles your mind.
I can understand why the BBC, for years, has blocked people *outside* the UK, because only people in the UK have paid the licensing fee. That makes kind of sense, even though it is still a stupid way to solve the problem - give people outside the UK a way to pay too.
But blocking people in the UK (who have all paid for the BBC through government taxes), while giving everyone else free access, is just one of those things my brain simply cannot comprehend. It goes against all forms of logic.
The problem, of course, is that I don't think this decision was made by some clueless manager. I think some government legislation is prohibiting BBC Worldwide from competing other media companies in the UK, and that is why they have to block the site.
Not that this explanation is any better. In today's connected world, BBC Worldwide would compete directly anyway.
Update: The BBC has responded confirming my suspicions that this block is the result of government legislation.
... making the content available to UK audiences is not as simple as removing the ads. bbc.com/Future is a commercial website produced by BBC Worldwide. Under the BBC's fair trading rules, commercial websites are not allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC's public services. This prevents us from being able to provide Future on bbc.co.uk
A couple of weeks ago I wrote the article "RESET: What If You Could Start Again?" In it I encouraged you to define what your world would be like if you could start *again*, from scratch, in 2015. As an example I promised to look at three different industries, starting with newspapers.
In 2004, the mobile phone market was, just like newspapers are today, heavily over saturated with many but very similar phones. This oversupply of similar products caused the demand for mobile phones to be so low that you could buy one for just $1 (+ a contract).
There was no market for yet another mobile phone manufacturer. But Apple looked at this market and identified a number of big problems. Problems that all other mobile manufacturers were reluctant to solve because it didn't fit their traditional mindset.
Fast forward to today, and Apple is the most valuable company on the planet. Nokia, once king of the hill, is in deep trouble. Apple is of course no longer alone, because Google quickly realized the same problems and created Android, and Microsoft created Windows Phone 7.
The problem with the phone industry was that the old companies where all focusing on the hardware design. The innovation was in the form-factor and how phones where presented to the public. Apple, Google and Microsoft, however, didn't focus on the design (even though the iPhone is quite beautiful). They focused on the utility of the phones themselves - that was the missing link. Nokia only focused on the hardware. The real power of mobile is not the package, but what you can do with it.
This is very noticeable when you compare product pages from Nokia and Apple. Nokia only talks about the hardware (the package), while Apple's product page is all about how the iPhone can be used.
Nokia failed to see the problem, because they believed their product was the package. Apple won because they realized the package was only a small part of the solution.
If you are in the newspaper industry, this should sound familiar. The newspaper industry is, like the phone companies of the past, defined around the concept that their product is a package, the newspaper itself. And what's within that package is just a collection of random news.
This is also why many traditional newspapers are so excited by the iPad. With it, they can take their box of random news and wrap it into a new form factor - thinking they are being innovative.
Newspapers are making the exact same mistakes that Nokia did with phones. Instead of looking at how their products could be used and extended, newspapers are only looking at the package.
Whenever newspaper editors talk about innovating for the future in the form of redefining the format, I'm reminded by Nokia. Nokia was the absolute master of creating new and beautiful phones. But Nokia never asked, "why do people need a phone? What do people want to do with it? What kind of environment are they in when they are using it? Can it be more than a phone?"
Just as the newspapers today never ask, "why do people need a newspaper? What can people *do* with the stories we write?"
If you really want to succeed in the connected world, you have to change the very foundation your product is based on. Putting on a fresh coat of paint, or putting it on a new device isn't going to change anything.
Baekdal.com
