Cross-posting: ECM Where?: Part 4 of 5 http://cicsworld.org/blogs/ctuite/ This may be the longest blog post in the series, but there also may be a few more ways of considering some of the practicalities of ECM than normal as well. Links to the previous posts in the series are on the right, and the Douglas Adams (stay tuned) finale is coming up next week.

"The mercenaries will always beat the draftees, but the volunteers will crush them both." - Chuck Noll, as quoted by Tony Dungy in "Uncommon"

It's been a while since the last Sophie-tech, so to review, I have a three year-old daughter, and when she was born it brought about a thought: she was born into an era of unprecedented technology growth - the first time I interfaced with a computer was around the fifth grade, the first time she did was via the monitoring before she was born - and I thought it would be good to observe how she naturally grows into what I have to adapt into via an occasional series.  This one has to do with smartphones.

Despite all the visions of handset-less smart communicators, embedded networking chips and all the other sci-fi thoughtwork, our production usage smartphones now involve basically two types of user interface - the keyboard and the touchscreen.  I'm discounting voice commands for now, since there are none currently in wide-spread use that are anywhere close enough to be able to be accurate. 

Sophie's reactions -

Risk: this is the child who dialed 9-1-1 on my previous cell phone,  so she's already known to be a button afficionado, and she maintains that consistently.  The risk of her dialing the emergency number is reduced on the button-based interface, but only because there are a lot of buttons.  On the touch screen interface she was able to wreak a new and different kind of havoc, because everywhere you touch there's a click and something happens.  She managed to fill my screen with icons and make a couple of calls to random contacts.

Rewards: This one was surprising. Smartphones with touchscreens specialize in providing large splashy and colorful graphics, so you'd assume that interface would be the toddler's choice.  You'd be wrong,  as I was.  Sophie prefers the buttons of the keyboard to the larger screen. She seems to somehow derive value from the tactile feedback of feeling the button go down.

Verdict: touchscreens come in second place.

How is that possible?  I'll put my 2 cents worth.  As humans we enjoy having our senses engaged when we do things.  If we listen to music we like to see pictures - hence MTV, at least before unreality TV.  If we eat a meal at a restaurant, we like to see the flames leap up as the fire brings the aroma out of the steaks.

A touchscreen is very sensitive,  and due to the way it works you can accidentally do a large number of things with an errant swipe, or by remaining too long on one area. 

The button-centric design isn't as flexible, but provides feedback and a greater degree of control.  There is no approximate with a keypad.

I actually prefer the touchscreen for its resolution and the flexibility, but there is an underlying nod toward the need to engage more than just the eyes - the haptic response. Even the hybrids that use both are providing the two ways because there is not a clearly superior method. This one boils down to preferences and not really on the technology. It looks like two methods are here to stay, at least until the augmented reality implants with linkage to the nervous system.

Word of Thumb: Product Placement Gone Viral, Or Am I Just Showing Off

"Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has." - William S. Burroughs, as quoted on thinkexist.com


This is a little outside of my normal posting style, but is connected, especially to the blogosphere posts from one of my other blogs (shameless cross-blog promotion), to something I wanted to write on, and was now inspired by FINALLY being able to accomplish something that I have wanted to accomplish since last October.  More on that in a sec.

A lot of things are written today about social media, but it seems a topic more people know about than do.  It's a buzzword, which is a shame.  People like to talk about it, but still for the average user it is halfheartedly-implemented, which means they stop right where their keyboard does.  That's okay to do for some, but it barely scratches the surface of what is out there and can be done when you add more than just reading and typing into the mix.

October, 2010, brought an interesting epiphany for me, because I was brought more into the SM (aside: social media needs a rename - if abbreviated that way the human mind will slip an errant "&" in there...) world than I had been previously.  I had the opportunity to be part of the FlipCam Team at IBM's Information on Demand (IOD) conference.  Disclaimer: I'm not an IBM employee, just a user and big fan of their Enterprise Content Management software. My task there was to carry around a FlipCam and use it to provide video snippets of "A Day in the Life of An ECM Attendee" that could be turned into video promos/summaries and placed on the conference's YouTube channel at the end of each day.

Here's the kicker: that's the extent of the requirements (other than to get signed releases if we filmed someone as an interview, or focus of the segment).  There was no script, at least at first.  It was just a collection of individuals, each with a separate focus at the conference, providing their perspectives.

So far this sounds like general marketing and promo stuff, but it's different, and more powerful.  There were no scripts from the folks running the program, but in beginning to think about how best to do what I needed to do, and in trying to thnk about how to make something engaging, since they were letting me run around with a new tech toy, I came up with plans for what and when I wanted to film.  I then followed these sort of short scripts, with asides and other things that I had to think about, and wanted to think about.

It was fun working, but doing something I liked, and it was related to my actual job.  It was exciting because it provided an outlet to creativity and an audience for that creativity.  It allowed me to interact with what I was doing and the things that were happening there at the conference, and to create new ways to tell the story about my particular corner of the world. 

At that point it was just footage, but the social part came in when I sent Tweets and blogged about it, with links to the videos the team was shooting, it allowed me to share with an ever-broadening group of folks.  When the links were seen by co-workers on campus, they forwarded them on to others via e-mail, and so on and so on.  The kicker: IBM gained promotion within an audience which included a personal introduction from someone the consumers would at least passingly care about.  In the same project, I gained a voice and creative outlet, and IBM gained representation in a marketing aspect for both the conference, and their software products.  Symbiosis...

So to the title of this post.  Social media gives us all both opportunities to gain voices, and opportunities to gain marketing exposure for the things we do, or are involved in.  In traditional media, if you see a real label, the manufacturer has paid to have it appear.  With social media, however, there is no placement, just glimpses into real things happening in real life.  I had so much fun doing the FlipCam stuff that I got interested in possibly doing more of the same type of thing using my cell phone's video capability.  I hunted around for free tools (I'll buy full versions as I do more of this, but until I find out which things work well...) to do the translations, and the editing, and to get the time, but in the end all of those things came together and I was able to put video I shot into this blog post.  Again, it's not an IBM commercial, it's kind of like my first FlipCam video without the FlipCam.  It's not product placement, but it winds up being a mention of something I do like (the smarter planet initiative), delivered by my favorite toddler when we talked. Here's the story, with a final point below the video:

I brought my older kids each a flashlight from the conference as a 'thanks for not tying your mother up and throwing a raging party while I was safely a couple thousand miles away' present, but for the toddler I bought a little T-shirt.  When I got home, she recognized the letters IBM and asked me what else it said.  I told her, "Let's build a smarter planet," and she repeated it back to me.  It was spontaneous, and cute, and though I had to ask her to say it again after I took a second to turn my camera on, it wasn't scripted.  The lighting was bad, the audio was bad and it wasn't a commercial, it was just a cute moment in which was also some portion of a message about something, now captured in a format that can be used within social media, as well as sent to grandparents and whatnot.

Final point: social media provides a new level of connection between the consumers and the producers.  Today a company that does not engage in an open social discourse is at a disadvantage.  There are a lot of old-guard 'command and control' types who want to be able to script, massage, filter and otherwise align social media into a one-way communication medium.  That can't be successful, because in an age where so much is digital, we have evolved relationships to have a cybernetic component, and most of us want a baseline level of honesty in our relationships. For instance, in one of my clips I mentioned it was exhausting to go to IOD because of the amount of information there is to digest.  'Command and control' says to change that to being energized because of the same factors; social media says it wants to know the straight story of how it was, PLUS know that when you catch up on sleep your brain lights up and applies all you learned. 

With a journey into the electronic we have lost some of the visceral, and by allowing something in that could in some way be taken as bad, the honesty quotient for the work was raised.  Honesty means that when something is wrong we talk about it, when times are good we talk about it, and we grow old and develop together.  And when we have something funny on YouTube, that sometimes promotes things that we are interested in.  I'm sorry to report that a lot of initiatives, and more of those in the education space than you'd expect, are being done in the wrong manner.

Alvin Toffler and the Word of the Decade, 30 Years Later

"The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn." - Alvin Toffler, per a listing of his quotes on Ask.com

Thirty years ago, Toffler coined the term 'prosumer', meaning that the user of the future would be both a producer and a consumer of content. At the time he created that, it hadn't been three years since Kenneth Olsen declared that there'd never be a need for anyone to have a computer in their home. There was no such thing as a smart phone.  There was no internet.  There was no Cisco Systems, and Microsoft was spelled Micro-soft. The closest thing to YouTube was the rerunning of Candid Camera on one of the three national networks, and the only shared music at the time was via radio, on American Bandstand, or on Lawrence Welk.  Online meant that electricity was flowing.

As I reflect on the technology in use today, at the connectedness, at the removal of physical barriers to the storage and use of data, it's hard to imagine a time when we all WEREN'T prosumers.  What has happened is that we have removed the barriers to production and marketing that used to exist.  Where once a network of brick and mortar stores were needed to sell a large amount of stock, a listing of potential materials for sale can be placed on a website with ordering and production taking place simultaneously, taking some of the guesswork out of the manufacturing arena. 

We have gone past the physical layer into the logical layer of the way things work, going from being users of specific solutions to being users of services which we simultaneously provide to others in some way.  If you remember the widespread rollout of touch tone telephone service, many of the telephones in ue had a switch to be used to select whether the particular area where the phone was plugged in had pulse or tone service.  The process to move from pulse to tone service took decades, and may or may not have been hindered by the machinations within the telecommunications space, depending on the data you look at, and your personal bent.

Contrast that with the change a few years ago to digital only signal for cellular telephones.  There was no generation of phones where you manually selected which to use, the functionality was in a few circuits, but mostly there was a large-scale change, enabled by the fact that the phones themselves would generally be replaced within a couple of years, as opposed to the landline telephones, which lasted decades.  We went from the conventional, hands-off landlines to the more configurable cellular model, and all of a sudden there were more and more things that could be done, and offered to the consumers and by the consumers.

Now we are squarely in the age of the smartphone, which is where the thoughts here originated.  I think we are crossing the last frontier between the producers and the consumers, the final barrier to being able to do what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and I think there is a strong correlation between it and the way that computers themselves will be used.  We have crossed the barrier of the operating system from being a product in and of itself to being a means of doing what we need to do, malleable and useful instead of limiting and mostly there just to do things we don't understand.

I was a die hard Blackberry user ever since the forced switch from analog signal (truth be told I preferred the analog because the coverage seemed better - something not surprising since we know that analog signal has a more gradual decline than a digital signal, and your coverage now plummets at the edges), and the tools that were available for it were okay, for the most part.  It was a closed operating system, and though you could develop applications for it, it wasn't something that could be easily broached.

I watched the advent and ascension of the iPhone with more than a little interest, and was impressed by the breadth of applications available for it, but it was still a closed operating system, with tight controls over who was allowed to distribute applications for the dear old iOS.  Even so, just having an operating system that would allow innovation and creativity in development was appealing to say the least.  A closed system, though neat, and combined with the lack of features to support more worklike applications, was not enough to lure me away from the closed system I was already used to.  The hardware was impressive, as was the software, but the closedness was not to my liking.

Enter the Android operating system.  I watched with great interest the development of an open source operating system for a smartphone, as well as the corresponding hardware developments (not to mention Motorola's catchy Droid advertisements).  It finally seemed a choice was emerging that was both rich in features and open enough to offer flexibility in creating your own applications when others wouldn't do. 

One thing that was striking to me was the tone of several of the applications,  Instead of having things done for you already, several of them had a utility flavor to them to allow users to do a lot of the same things that they would on a regular computer.  As an example, I'm attaching a link to a ringtone I created to allow me to indulge a bit of gadget envy because I chose a Samsung phone instead of a Motorola, and so I couldn't really use the Droid ringtone, since it is a trademark, even though it is a great combination of feature and advertising.  So, for your amusement, should you be so inclined, and because my sister wanted a copy, here's the link to the Android ringtone: Android Ringtone  You'll need to download it and place it in the folder where your ringtones reside, and if it doesn't work for you shoot me an e-mail to charles.tuite@gmail.com and I'll send you a zipped file.

You'll notice that the file is sitting in a folder in Google Docs, which is something for later exploration.  You'll also notice that I was finally enabled to be a full prosumer, producing something I wanted via a tool that I consumed, but also providing what I produced to others.  The rub, if you're an old-style capitalist of the traditional ilk, is that I provided the tone to you for the same cost as the application I downloaded which allowed me to do it.  It was free.

The point is that only the old-style iron out the door, volume-based, quantity over quality capitalists find that to be a problem.  I propose that for a prosumer-based economy we need a prosumer-based capitalism system, where the value placed on a device or application is not derived from the ability of the producer to drive the market, not derived from the ability to achieve lock in in some way (such as the OS), and not derived from things accomplished decades ago.  Instead, I believe value that is delivered successfully should be the driver of capitalization, and that delivery of that value and the revenue streams may not need to be delivered from the same place.  This is a relatively new model and is ripe with risk until it gets fully figured out, and it is where the next innovation lies. 

With our feet leaving the ground as things move to the cloud, and the reduction of other barriers, it's time we had a new system anyway.  If we get out ahead of the curve and create that system, then we'll be on it when the rest of the traditional model is sent out to pasture, like the pulse dialing, analog cell phone, and whatever other examples there may be.  Consider this: you can find blacksmiths in almost any area of the United States, but carriage makers really don't exist anymore.Why? Because carriages were locked into a certain operating system, while blacksmiths made material for carriages, but also nails, and custom iron goods, and lamps, and fixtures, and equipment for Renaissance fairs, and, and, and...  Both of them used raw materials, only one of them used raw materials well and in a flexible manner.  Think about it.