Computer manufacturer Dell has unveiled a series of 11 new laptop designs courtesy of the Threadless community.
Threadless is best known as a t-shirt design business, to which more 80,000 
artists and designers put forward their design ideas. They are voted on and the most popular are printed and sold online through its online shop.
I’ve been following other business ideas based on crowdsource design like this other one for VW here at Springwise
User recommendations and crowd buzz are redefining the way some online shoppers behave…
Examples like Crowdstorm are a new way for consumers to find what to buy based on the buzz around products. Users recommend products, and the crowd defines the best products by recommending what they know and like. Popular products go to the top of the list, weak products disappear. It works rather like the popular news website Digg.
What is buzz? Well for social shopping sites it is measured by the amount of activity surrounding a product: how many times a product has been viewed, how many bloggers have written about it, and how many users have commented about it.
Friends can be added which helps build the crowd effect, and these friends can be people they already know or those they’ve met on the site and whose product recommendations they trust.
Expect in the future; users posting their own product images and videos, and top-rated members being invited to beta-test new products from big brands.
UK-based Crowdstorm was founded by Phil Wilkinson, who also set up online price comparison sites ShopGenie and Kelkoo, and aims to be one of the internet’s best sources of impartial product information.
Another social shopping network to have launched recently – but in the US – is ThisNext. Featuring slick design and sending visitors down one of three paths: Discover, Recommend and Shopcast. The discover section lets users browse products recommended by others. Clicking on a item allows them to add it to their wishlist, recommend it, or find out where to buy the product. Users can recommend products by creating themed lists (from ‘Japanese Snacks’ to ‘Things I Cannot Do Without’), or simply by clicking on an easy to install ‘Add to ThisNext’ browser button.
Appealing to the blogging crowd, ThisNext’s standout feature is shopcasting: bloggers can create small banners for their website. These so-called shopcast badges either display their own recommendations or those of the ThisNext community, broadcasting the products they love or must have.
I was asked to play the role of futurologist for a CVL newsletter this month, so I reached for inspiration on style of predictions; I went straight to the wise words of my favourite author on the subject, Scott Adams. He writes in the The Dilbert Future!, “There are many methods for predicting the future. For example, you can read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards, or crystal balls. Collectively, these methods are known as ‘nutty methods’. Or you can put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer models, more commonly referred to as ‘a complete waste of time’.”
So with all that said here is what I think will happen in the next ten years?
Bill’s Prediction No.1 – we’ll be hiding from the data deluge
We’ve been riding the broadband wave for at least 6 years and will continue to do so for several years in our pursuit of ‘always on’ high speed access. The telecoms world has been obsessed with how many households and users have broadband access and how fast that access is, but we will get bored of these figures when we have something else more interesting to talk about.
Fixed line access speeds will improve and the emerging mobile broadband technologies mean we will have enough bandwidth for all our needs wherever we are – but with all this fast access at our fingertips in 10 years what we will really want is to be ‘sometimes off’.
Broadband speeds of 10Mb will be the norm even on the move, but more of us will be seeking out blind spots to hide from the constant deluge of data.
Bill’s Prediction No.2 – where did I put my invisible communication device?
Currently, fashionable trends seem to take about twenty to thirty years before they appear again – just look at how many kids today are wearing skinny jeans, going to open air rock concerts and think that Paul Weller, Chopper bicycles and Blake’s 7 are cool. We could see 1998 technology becoming fashionable again in 2018. What does that mean? It means you and I will be using the latest micro-sized devices and the kids of the day will be showing off their brick-sized mobile phones.
Everyone will have mobile phones and most of us will have a selection to choose from, depending on our mood and what we are doing that day. There’ll even be options to build your phone into your clothes, and some early adopters will be integrating their communications devices into their own bodies to create a cyborg solution.
Bill’s Prediction No.3 – the telly will always be on
Our pattern of TV viewing is on the verge of a major shift – and shift is the key word here – from the ‘sit back and receive’ style we grew up with to a mode in which we enjoy more control over what we watch and when we watch it. As the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) becomes more commonplace in our living rooms more of us are watching ‘timeshift TV’, i.e. watching our favourite programmes when it suits us rather than as scheduled. Within 10 years we will benefit from the ability to enjoy ‘placeshift TV’, i.e. take our TV schedule with us when we travel so those favourite programmes are available on a TV, PC or mobile device wherever we are.
Bill’s Prediction No.4 – shopping only for experiences
As the technology improves, and as we get more and more comfortable with the security and reliability of the ordering and delivery processes, we will do all our ordering online. The actual shopping experience will be much more interesting as stores become showrooms and more retailers focus on creating ‘experience stores’ like this extreme sports store in Florida.
Bill’s Prediction No.5 – these, and all other predictions, will turn out to be entirely untrue
The one thing that is certain with predictions is that they will not be right. History is littered with awsome predictive errors including some made by the most prestigious of scientists Try this for British technological foresight at its finest:
“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
- Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.
In 2007 there has been a dramatic increase in usage of internet for television, at the same time viewing has declined for the terrestrial TV channels - figures from Nielsen Online suggest that almost 21 million people in Britain visited a television, video or movie-related web site in September 2007, a 28% increase on the previous year.
In the UK the TV broadcasters have seen their share of television viewing slide – Channel 4 has seen its share of viewing fall by almost 12% over the year, while Five has fallen by nearly 10%, BBC One and Two are also down by 3%, while ITV dropped nearly 2%. This is no more than a percentage point in the share of each channel, but collectively the trend is clear. Viewing of other channels has increased correspondingly by nearly 9%, partly as result of more people having access to multichannel digital television.
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, speaking at their global forum in San Jose, suggested that by 2011, between 15 to 20% of internet traffic will be video delivered to the television. He dismissed plans by broadcasters to offer their programmes online, saying he could record any show he wants and watch it on his personal vide recorder.
Valerio Zingarelli, the recently appointed CEO of new entrant, Babelgum says, “the intense competition can only lead to greater innovation and a substantial increase in service quality for viewers, and we’re certainly expecting more new entrants to arrive in 2008. Whilst traditional television platforms such as cable and broadcast TV still serve a large audience, those viewers unwilling to wear the straight-jacket linear TV offerings put them in are seeking new ways of accessing content tailored to their specific taste, whether it be sport, news or entertainment. Broadcasters worried about web television should realise internet TV is not trying to replace traditional TV, but is merely giving increasingly savvy viewers greater control and choice. It is this greater control, and choice, which will see internet TV take its place as a conventional platform alongside broadcast TV in 2008 and beyond.”
Meanwhile research from Nokia predicts that in five years up to a quarter of the entertainment enjoyed by people will have been created, edited and shared within their social circle rather than being produced by traditional media companies. Their study, entitled A Glimpse of the Next Episode, carried out by The Future Laboratory, surveyed over 9,000 consumers aged between 16-35.
Mark Selby, vice president of multimedia at Nokia said, “from our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call ‘Circular’. The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups — a form of collaborative social media.”
All these indicators point to a continued shift away from TV, and this could be accelerated by another trend – place shifting is remotely accessing personal media from another location over the internet, and is destined to become a standard feature of personal computers and set-top boxes.
A new report on this emerging market is called – Bending the rules of time and space: Trends and analysis for place shifted media, and will be published by The Diffusion Group in the first week of 2008 to coincide with the CES in Las Vegas.
Colin Dixon, senior consultant at The Diffusion Group, suggests that even if place shifting proves to be a compelling application, it will not be capable of acting as a stand-alone revenue driver or support an independent hardware platform, but with place shifting embedded in devices from set-top boxes to digital media adaptors and games consoles, it will have a significant impact on how people interact with digital media.
So all in all it seems like 2008 will be a big year for TV via the internet – but one thing hasn’t changed – we are still at the mercy of our internet connection and the bandwidth available incoming to our PC. We all know what an awful viewing experience that can create, so for me in the foreseeable future it will be downloads only! Whilst downloading video content requires a little planning ahead, at least it ensures better viewing quality than streaming.
I just realised I’ve been pushing similar views about digital entertainment for about 4 years now, here is an interview from 2005 when I was working with BT on a proposition for movie downloads to exploit the emergence of broadband access as a mass market – that work was later subsumed into BT Vision led by Dan Marks.
We are way past the point where broadband access in the UK was enjoyed only by the few and as always when we cross the chasm from early adopters to the majority we experience a shift in consumer expectations. It’s the shift from utility to entertainment – today speed is no longer a hinderance, tomorrow content and services (digital media services) will be the differentiators.
The broadband internet has created tremendous opportunities for new digital media services to develop in music, video, photo, games and gambling. At the same time pirated distribution and downloading has taken the early advantage and many new brands have appeared, often with disruptive business models. Some of these models worked, some didn’t, some are purely disruptive rather than commercial, many achieve high usage volumes with little marketing commitment. We can and should learn from these new applications and services where they highlight and open up clear customer demand. Indeed, as more consumers look for interesting and exciting digital downloads so the popular consumer brands will take their place and supplement the ‘cool’ service with the ‘trust’ factor– Shelley Taylor calls it “converting pirates to pilots”.
Research from Strategy Analytics shows high levels of interest among consumers for legal and convenient subscriptions services for music, video and networked games. Ovum research demonstrates a willingness to pay for such services, with video on demand, games and adult entertainment attracting the highest potential subscription values. So if we assume that as broadband adoption increases ARPU will decrease what will operators do to counter that problem? Three approaches seem inevitable – more bandwidth with new pricing models such as ‘pay per megabit’, premier bandwidth services with reduced contention and improved quality of service protection and premium content and applications.
Let’s look at music downloading as the most established example of the digital media phenomenon. Illegal peer to peer services kicked off demand, Apple turbo-charged it with the iPod and now everyone wants a piece of the action. In the coming year we will see some terrific next generation music services offered by established online brands and IP enabled music devices on the high street to move your virtual music collection away from your PC to your HiFi. So what’s that all about?
Well, it’s a form of evolution. As we move more and more of our personal music collection to the hard-drive and the network we will want to control our own entertainment experience rather than feeling that everything is locked up and inaccessible. So aside from the technology development that’s moving quickly enough for most of us there’s also a demand for a simple, intuitive customer experience built around us rather than focused on the service providers product. The experience includes where and how we access our music. Some of these experience issues are about the customer interface, these issues are not new and fortunately there is a lot we can learn from how the most successful e-commerce companies have persuaded customers to buy products online through intuitive web page design, simple transaction processes, effective merchandising and attractive pricing and promotions.
So – we have broadband service providers, we have content and application providers, we have portals plus the specialist web-sites and we also have consumer electronics and computer companies – all involved in this evolution of the digital entertainment experience. It seems like the battle-lines are being drawn in the war to ‘own’ the consumer relationship in the digital home.
The digital home is inevitable and the consumer is powerless to resist. The big guns of marketing are rolling out even now. This is because the combined value of the consumer electronics industry and the online entertainment market runs to hundreds of billions – whether you report it in dollars, pounds or euros. Consumer electronics and computer companies are converging on the digital living room, major computer companies like HP and Dell, and household names like Philips and Sony aren’t planning on leaving without a fight. At the same time the telcos, broadband service providers and ISPs like BT, SBC, Yahoo! and AOL all expect to deliver the services that bring this digital home to life via a fat broadband pipe and a wireless network.
Consumers are rapidly adopting large LCD displays, high-powered multimedia PCs, and portable devices, but connecting them all is still a work in progress. But the UK now has over 6million broadband connections and the rate of adoption is accelerating fast – as homes are becoming sufficiently wired. Once the fat pipe and the wireless network is in place and these fantastic multimedia devices surround us in our homes we come to the question of where the digital living room begins and ends. With mobile phones, PDAs, and portable game players becoming more powerful, the four walls that once housed all of our movies, music, and photos are breaking down. The time we spend on entertainment now blends into the workday, helping us stay closely connected to business associates and family. The broad use of the Internet, which spawned the previous tech boom, and the increasing number of high-speed connections will inspire new generations of technology and a huge wave of digital entertainment services. The convergence or interoperability of fixed-line and mobile networks will open up our digital home and extend our personal digital world, but that’s a subject for another day.
The latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index says that online sales in the UK have grown by another 38% in the first half of the year and now account for 17 pence in every pound spent. The report says this figure could rise to as high as 50% in five years, but I’m wondering if it could it be 100% in ten years?
Sounds impossible doesn’t it! But, perhaps all our ordering will be online if stores become showrooms. There are currently very few examples of great “experience stores” but one of my favourites is this extreme sports store in Florida. I’m still looking for a whole new wave (pardon the pun if you’ve checked out the store) of experience stores in the UK.
Please let me know when you find more examples.
