Oh Yong Hwee

The Kinect for Windows blog reported the use of Kinect for mapping body shape (8 sets of Kinect actually) so that the data can be used to help shopper find the correct clothing:

Finding the perfect fit so clothing conforms to a person’s unique body shape is at the heart of the Bodymetrics Pod. Developed by Bodymetrics, a London-based pioneer in 3D body-mapping, the Bodymetrics Pod was introduced to American shoppers for the first time today during Women’s Denim Days at Bloomingdale’s in Century City, Los Angeles.

I’m excited by this news (it’s news to me; although a quick Google revealed that a few companies have already done that, including one by Cornell University). Owning a space in data is one of the key strategies for any tech companies. Like Facebook owning our social data, Foursquare owning our location, and even Apple owning (mostly) the mobile space, it seems to me the next potential big data is the body itself.

This presents a great opportunity for online retail to finally take off. Imagine a shopper having his or her body shape scanned at a Kinect pod in a city, say at a subway station or shopping mall, and then have the information stored online. It will likely be stored with a tech company, similar to a company like Facebook where it knows your friends and interests (your social graph). Then, he or she can go online to shop. Any online retailer can then give you the perfect online shopping experience by:

1. Having all clothing “scanned” to the last detail, e.g. for a pair of jeans, it would not just be the waist and height, but every contour along the jeans. The same Kinect scanners would be suited for this.
2. Connecting to the tech company to retrieve your body shape data, through some form of authorization like how Facebook does it with OAuth (some of us still refer to it as Facebook Connect).
3. Data from (1) and (2) is matched to determine whether it fits.

The more interesting online retail experience would be to show the shopper exactly where the clothing fit or not fit, and how it looks exactly on the shopper. This would be like light-years ahead of where it is now with the clothing super imposed over the body through a webcam that requires a lot of imagination.

These body shape data would make online shopping so much fun and realistic that it can really disrupt the experience of retail shopping. It can be used to help buy anything from the correct ring size, caps, blouse and jeans, to shoes, socks, gloves and, erm, condoms.

These data can be shared with online retailers like Net-a-porter, and fashion companies, through the same authorisation that we have gotten used to with authorizing apps on Facebook. It could be sharing partial data like feet data only to a shoe company if the shopper loved the brand so much, so that any catalogue release can be customized and sent to the shopper.

Taste aside, buying a t-shirt for a loved one would be so much easier. The body shape data can easily be shared with spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend, family members and close friends though some form of authentication and authorization, not unlike the current Facebook and Foursquare authorization.

Depending on the shopper, the body shape data can be updated once a year or even monthly, since scanning would be so convenient and cheap (8 Kinects cost less than US$1,500).

I am quite sure all these will be so exciting for the male shopper, that fashion for males will no longer be relegated to a small section in a mall.

Google+ is getting all the buzz right now, is the most talked about Google product at the moment and has a reported 20 million users already.

It has similar (but lesser) features to Facebook, so initially it is really puzzling why people would want to sign up for another social network. But there are two key features that make it unique.

First is the concept of Circles. I have being conscientiously categorizing my friends on Facebook into groups, but beyond organizing, I don’t use it much. It is not a promoted feature on Facebook to limit your social sharing to particular groups of people, but Circles is by design part of Google+.

One of the default Circles during setup is “Following”, which is taken from the likes of Twitter and Quora. Social networking has become so much a part of our life, that the lines between our professional and personal lives and interests have become blurred. On a daily basis, we want to read a stream of news, posts and updates from our family, friends, colleagues and people in our industry. “Following” allows that without having to add people you don’t know (or rather, don’t know you) into one single network. So now you have the best of both worlds. Like the old saying: Facebook = people you go to school with, and Twitter = people you wish you go to school with.

Second is integrating Google’s own product like Reader, Google Talk and Search that we use every day, although I think the integration needs better execution. With Spark, it is now a default news provider in your social network. Unfortunately it is not part of the stream (yet).

The “+1″ feature, similar to the Facebook Like feature, is integrated to both search and social network products. I think this is very smart, but again, execution not done properly – a click on “+1″ isn’t very prominently announced like on Facebook.

I was wrong about Google Wave but with social network, Twitter-like following, chat, hangouts, and Reader/Pulse-like Spark, I’m going to go ahead anyway and say that Google+ is the next to watch.

Facebook finally launched Places last week. So the land grab begins. With so many ways to represent a brand on Facebook through profiles, Pages, groups and community pages, it is important for brands to understand these different properties and how they work. A place created in Facebook Places becomes a community page, which can confuse users if you also have a Page.

I won’t compare the differences between Facebook Places and Foursquare. These are available with a simple Google search. What I would like to talk about are the fundamental difference in concept between the two and what brands should do.

Foursquare is built from the ground as a location based service. The key concept is that it is about where you are and where people, not necessarily your friends, are. It relies on proximity to push information, such as:

• Pushing friends’ tips about a place to you when you are near the place
• Showing the list of places available for check in by increasing order of distance from your current location
• Displaying how many people are currently at the place. And you can earn a Swarm badge for example for checking in to a place with many people
• It can be used to know where is the most popular place at this moment
• Encouraging check in and adding new places through points and mayorships, because it is about discovering new places.

Facebook, on the other hand, is built on top of a social network service. It is about telling your friends where you are. I think they have not truely utilized the location services compared to Foursquare, for reasons described in the five points above.

Competing directly with Foursquare however, I believe Facebook Places will overtake Foursquare as the de facto location check in service simply because of it’s user base. In fact I think Facebook Places will overtake Foursquare within the next 2-3 months.

The reason is simple – it is conveniently available to much more people, and easier than handling two applications, since almost all users in Foursquare are in Facebook. I have seen more friends use Facebook Places in the last week than friends who use Foursquare in the last two years. I don’t think users of Facebook Places will know what they missed in Foursquare anyway.

Hence, I would recommend that marketers and businesses do the following (quickly especially for the first two):

• Add your place
  • Do so if no one has added it yet. Like Foursquare, the only person who can subsequently edit the place’s information, in this case name and description, is the person who added it.
  • Facebook Places uses GPS information only, unlike Foursquare which also uses address and cross street to pin point a place. Hence the location is as accurate as the GPS reception.
  • One key field is the description. Instead of how far a place is from you, Places shows a description line below the place’s name, so it is a good place to describe what you offer or even use it as a advertising liner to shout about discounts.
• Update your place
  • Usually, users add your place when they want to check in, and do not have the necessary info nor time to provide enough information. It is in your best interest to provide the accurate information.
  • Since you did not add the place, you can only suggest edits through Facebook website.
• Claim your place
  • This has to be through the website version. I have not done this, but have gone through the process on Foursquare. I believe you need to provide documentary proof that you are really the owner. With this, you can actually do some interesting advertising with Places.
• Advertise
  • There is a new way to advertise in Facebook, using check ins. If a person checks in to your place, you can turn that into a Facebook Ad that displays to the person’s friends. Read more here:
    http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1159
    http://www.geek.com/articles/news/facebook-is-now-turning-your-likes-and-check-ins-into-ads-20110126/

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This last trend is on digital technology in the real world. The trends are not in order of importance.

At the basic level, companies use the web and digital technologies (ie. email, mobile) for communication purposes. Most have a website and email. Other than the email, the IT department are usually not involved and the website belongs to the marketing department.

Some companies moved beyond this basic level to embrace digital technologies for their business processes, eg. using online services for surveys, storage, business intelligence, conferencing, etc, etc. Usually led by the CIO, the objective is to enable business processes faster and more efficiently. However, the fundamental process within the business usually hasn’t changed.

What we are seeing now is more profound. Increasingly we are seeing more new businesses built from scratch with digital technology as a strategic enabler. Like Trend #9, those born of the Internet generation sees business and digital differently. It is not a “web presence”, not marketing nor replacing the brick-and-mortar model. It is not using technology to replace some processes, but rather a new business model. Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman wrote in Techcrunch in 1 Jan 2011 describing these businesses as hybrid startups: “A hybrid business is built entirely from scratch, to be innovative in its online technology and its real-world operations… web entrepreneurs are teaming up with doctors to build better hospitals, with scientists to build better drugs, with lawyers to build better firms, with manufacturers to build better factories, with teachers to build better schools. We can make it new everywhere, not just on the web.”

This is something that affects both client and agency side. As digital agencies, do we see our businesses as marketing, or is it more than that. Do we always start work when the product is out of the factory, or do we have the opportunity to use our creative and technology know-how to change it. As Wired Magazine wrote on the Jan 2010 issue:“The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.”

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This tenth trend is on website optimization for social media (or I sometimes call it share optimization). The trends are not in order of importance.

Search still dominates how people find content. However, more and more content are being shared amongst friends in social networks.

When Facebook introduced the LIKE button, many saw this as the start of the end of traditional search. As Techcrunch says on 25 Mar 2010 “…the entire Internet will be turned into a tributary system for Facebook.” Many websites jumped to implement both the LIKE button and Comments Box.

There’s one thing to take note of though. How does your web page appear on Facebook when someone clicks on the Like button? If you have done SEO, it won’t look too bad. However, there’s more you can do.

(picture credit: Facebook Open Graph Protocol)

The above picture shows how a click on the Like button gets propagated to Facebook. There’s this thing called the Open Graph Protocol which Facebook explains “The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.” Within the protocol, there are additional meta tags like “type” (as in what type of content does this pertain to: sport, restaurant, movie, song, book, etc) and location. These are not found in traditional SEO.

Back to the recent website project I described in Trend #1, we created special OG meta tags for every single page of the website. Also for each shop, OG tags including type (restaurant, bar, etc), image, lat/long, address, locality, postal code, country and phone numbers are included. If you page has a video, special OG video tags like width and height can be included as well.

These additional information helps Facebook present the proper “info box” when a user’s friend mouse over the name of what the user liked.

My 2011 Watch List for sharing optimization:

• Facebook Social Plugins – this is constantly changing and I believe more changes will come.
• Foursquare – tips left by users are pushed to friends when they check-in near the vicinity. I don’t think Foursquare has done much yet for business though (a simple process to claim my office location took 3 months). I think with their new funding, they should be able to do more this year.
  

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This ninth trend is on the death of emails. The trends are not in order of importance.

For my generation, we were born with emails. In fact, I don’t open the physical letterbox regularly. Probably once a month if I can remember. So it is quite frustrating to receive government letters like summons telling you to respond within 7-14 days of the letter. If it is so urgent, shouldn’t it be on email because I check everyday? Is there a law that says you must check letters every week?

And similarly for the younger generation, email is as antique as snail mail is to me. The Straits Times recently reported that youth prefer chat and social media messaging over email, which they considered too formal. The last time a (newly acquainted) friend asked me for my email address, it was to find me on Facebook. I think this is the same for many of us. We traded photos and updates, chatted online, all without exchanging a single email.

The problem with email is that people are paying less and less attention to email marketing messages, and SPAM is an on-going issue. People do pay more attention to short non-disruptive messages on Facebook, and are less likely to mark a Facebook post as SPAM. As highlighted in Edelman Digital’s 11 Digital Trends to Watch in 2011: “In 2011, marketers will begin to realize the value of attention – and not just reach and impressions – in driving conversion.”

Many still treasure the email addresses in their mailing list, and have registration forms on websites to collect it. My recommendation to marketers is to move away from the numbers game and emails. Instead, focus on where the attention is. For now, it is social media.

My 2011 Watch List for death of email:

• Interactivity Analytics – as more and more marketing activities are on Facebook, the analytics need to looked at. Ensure your interactions are measured using Facebook Insights, although I think Facebook Insights is currently very bare.

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This eighth trend is on the concept of check-in. The trends are not in order of importance.

Foursquare was amongst the pioneer of check-ins to locations as a form of social networking. The concept of “check-in” however, has extended to other activities such as the TV shows you watched (Miso) and retail (shopkick).

I had the idea last year to build a check-in app for anything we buy, eg. a pack of potato chips, a book. The check-in will be a simple scan of the bar code using the phone camera. Then it recognizes what you bought, and you can tag photos and comments to it. This can turn into a form of CRM with the big brands. But I think someone is on to that already, so it’s back to my day job.

Online is turning to be a digital recorder of a person’s life. Facebook and Foursquare touched on friends and places, but I think there is so much more. I think people do like the idea of a recorded history of activities (check out Dipity and Allofme). Hence, I think that soon, we will check-in to any activity that we do – check-in anything we buy, check-in the wine we drank, check-in the books we read, check-in the people we met.

In essence, the check-in is a form of rewards program with social networking feature. For marketers, consider leveraging of the check-in on Foursquare, especially if you are in retail or F&B business.

My 2011 Watch List for check-in:

• Facebook Places – will it come to Asia finally?
• Taggo.Me – recognizing your Facebook fans when they actually turn up at your shop. Not a bad idea. Some cost issue in implementation, but I think the idea works.

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This seventh trend is on social media. The trends are not in order of importance.

Social networking will continue to grow and pretty soon dominate our lives. People will get more and more comfortable sharing more of their lives on the digital world.

As the blog post title suggest, I think it will come a point where people need to share an activity for it to be considered actually happened, just like the last New Year Countdown. Look at the staggering number from Facebook: “People celebrated New Year’s on Facebook by uploading a record number of photos — 750 million over NYE weekend alone!” by Randi Zuckerberg via Twitter on 4 Jan 2011.

600 million people on Facebook, with 250 million new users just in 2010. Facebook has to be part of the core digital strategy.

My 2011 Watch List for social media:

• Facebook – more than 600 million users and still growing.
• Facebook Places and Foursquare – how location will change the way we do social networking.
• Quora – this Q&A site is the current darling of silicon valley. Would it be another social network?

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This sixth trend is on data and AI. The trends are not in order of importance.

In the January 2011 edition of Wired Magazine, the feature The AI Revolution Is On says “By using probability-based algorithms to derive meaning from huge amounts of data, researchers discovered that they didn’t need to teach a computer how to accomplish a task; they could just show it what people did and let the machine figure out how to emulate that behavior under similar circumstances.”

On the web, artificial intelligence is already part of many websites we visit daily: Google’s search, Facebook recommendation of friends and the top news feed, Amazon’s recommendation engine, Pandora’s and Last.fm’s recommendation engine. These AI (some call it algorithm, which I think isn’t correct) derive their “intelligence” from massive amount of data generated by the huge user base, rather than mimicking human intelligence.

AI is not analytics like Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. The goal of analytics is to offer you data for analysis and conclusions, while AI is to offer your users something actionable or tangible like a recommendation.

How is this relevant to marketing? Recommendation and personalization engine is the first in mind. However, it is clearly very costly and difficult, and you may not have a huge data set to begin with. I think the way to go is to rely on third party services, via API as discussed on Trend #5.

The Facebook Recommendations plugin is one of the first to offer such service. It uses data from user interaction with the target website and the user’s friends’ interaction. I believe it takes into account the user Social Graph as well.

Google has a whole library of APIs for its various services, and a few have AI features. Use at your own risk though. Surprisingly I find Google APIs quite unstable because there’s so many and they seem to be created by different teams (they are, actually). If you are using Google AdSense, the AdSence API allows you to generate codes that display contextual ads. The YouTube Data API has some form of recommendation API as well that you can query for “related videos”, and the Google Language API deals with translation.

My 2011 Watch List for data and AI:

• Facebook Social Graph – I hope that the next step is to provide a set of APIs that give third parties AI capabilities such as recommendations based on the data from Facebook itself and the third party sites.
• Foursquare – I am interested to see how Foursquare’s location data can be used for recommendations and personalization beyond the “Trending Now” feature. Or does it need to be integrated with Facebook Social Graph?

This is a series of posts on my take on the 11 digital trends for 2011. This fifth trend is on APIs. The trends are not in order of importance.

Any silicon valley company who wants respectability and venture money needs to have APIs in their business plan. Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of communication protocol that allows one website (or usually a service) to “talk” to another. The actual data in the “talk” is usually in a format called JSON.

APIs allows a web service to extend it’s reach through other websites and services. With this, it helps secure other sites’ reliance of itself. Companies like Facebook, Groupon, Foursquare, Twitter and Google have sets of API for integration.

While this is very technical, API should be viewed as a very powerful digital strategy. There are two parts to this.

Firstly, leverage on strategic integration to plug your sites into the digital eco-system and social networks of users. The most famous API is arguably now the Facebook Graph API, which is the core of the Facebook Platform. You may have heard of Facebook Connect, which is the predecessor. Basically a user can register with your website using their Facebook login.

In Trend #1, I mentioned about a website project and touched on Foursquare. On top of creating Foursquare entries for the tenants of our client, we integrated Foursquare into the website using Foursquare API. Hence we can stream information about the mayor, checkins and tips for each tenant, and also post back new tips. We see this as a strategic on-the-ground retail integration with mobile and web. Tips and number of checkins on the website helps drive actual human traffic to the shop, and the retail promotions with Specials drive online participation.

On top of Foursquare, we fully integrated Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps via their respective APIs.

The Facebook Social Plugins like Like Button and Comments Box are good viral tools also. I would consider these the “long tail” of viral marketing. Each Like and comment gets published on the user’s wall and pull in a few clicks.

The second part of the API strategy is more work: consider whether your new website can provide a service to others. Extending your website service via APIs makes your presence stronger. This is actually a more subtle form of viral marketing. Like a biological virus, transmission takes many form and it is not necessary to be a “viral video”.

My 2011 Watch List for APIs:

• Updated API s from key sites – Foursquare recently launched new features including photos and comments on checkin. A new set of APIs was released. I will be watching Facebook also for some API updates.