VenChar

Camera phones as bar-code scanners

Sean Neville writes about an interesting camera phone application - the idea is to take a snapshot of the barcode, perform OCR on the image to extract the UPC, do a query on Amazon/Froogle and return product info and pricing.

In the category of interesting possibilities that open up at the intersection of technology trends/developments: in this case (1) ubiquitous wireless data access, (2) networked cameras, (3) OCR, (4) Amazon web services. As Neville eloquently puts it, this is about using a camera phone as a bar code scanner "to transform all physical goods into mere floor demos." Also file this under the category of innovative instances of technology reuse.

Elsewhere there was an interesting discussion a while back re: "the digital camera as a data-gathering device":

Because digital photography is so damn convenient, image capture becomes convenient for a variety [of] recording activities that hitherto were simply too clumsy to do with [a] film-based camera.

Update (11/6):

According to their press release, NeoMedia have combined one winning technology: Amazon's Associate program (which lets business access the Amazon catalog database), and one failed technology: the CueCat (where bar codes in advertisements would lead people to websites) into one interesting m-commerce application.

The shopper works by using your cameraphone to take a picture of a book's ISBN number (by using the bar code). Then using a proprietary application, the picture is sent to NeoMedia, who will use the bar code to determine the ISBN number and send you Amazon's price for that book. No mention is made of whether you will be able to purchase the book from your handset.

Via TheFeature.com and Smart Mobs.

Amazon's Search Inside The Book

I've been waiting for this for a while. Amazon announced today that you can now do full text searches of nearly 120,000 books in the Amazon catalog.

Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside them, not just on matches to author or title keywords. Search Inside the Book -- the name of this feature -- searches the complete inside text of more than 120,000 books -- all 33 million pages of them.

Wired has an article on this announcement that touches on a couple of the implications of this move from Amazon. It also ranges wider - drawing connections to ambitious attempts like Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive and the Gutenberg Project and commenting on why this move is strategic for Amazon:

This shifts power away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and toward the people who offer access to information about where this material can be found. Information about books, not ownership of copyrights, becomes a new center of power...Amazon's Search Inside the Book is not an ebook project. It is merely a catalog. But a decade of Internet history proves that the catalog is exactly what you want to own.

The contents of books may be the only publicly accessible data set with the potential to match Google's Web index both for size and utility. Search Inside the Book makes Amazon the sole guide to tens and ultimately hundreds of millions of pages of information. And while Google's business is vulnerable to any competitor that builds a better search engine, Amazon's book archive is the product of negotiated contracts with hundreds of publishers. Amazon has cornered the market on information that was once hidden away in books. The burden of the physical – the fact that the database Amazon uses is linked into a complex system involving real things – gives it a stunning, if perhaps temporary, advantage.

Elsewhere, Jon Udell notes that this search feature actually increases the value of the physical books that he owns, by making them searchable. Via Techdirt.

JungleScan

Just found out about this cool new service via WIFLblog.

JungleScan.com is a free service that
- Scans products on Amazon.com to record their sales ranking over time
- Allows you to start or participate in discussions about any website or Amazon.com item

Kevin Kelly:

Authors and journalists take note. Here is a way to track the Amazon sales ranking of a book or product over time. One can follow the ranking of your own novel, or CD, or you can collectively track the rise and fall of an idea, or group of items. I still haven't figured out why Amazon itself does not offer this service since they could do it so much better (all that data, and world-class skill in interface design), but in the alternative this cool free website does a good job.

For instance, to see how Clayton Christensen's new book (which I just ordered) is doing, see here.

The Innovator's Solution

Clayton Christensen has a new book out: The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Co-authored with Michael Raynor, "this is a book about how to create new growth in business".

From the Boston Globe review (via Emergic):

Christensen and Raynor set out to demystify innovation so that established companies can capitalize on changes and deliberately create disruptions.

Among the tactics they recommend:
- Target only customers and markets that are unappealing to established competitors.
- Pursue customers at the low end of a market or, even better, "nonconsumers" who don't even use a product.
- Help customers find simpler, more cost-effective solutions, rather than inventing new problems for them to solve.
- Be impatient for profits, but patient for growth.
- Work on new ways to keep your company growing while it is still robust .

"A dearth of good ideas is rarely the core problem" for established companies, Christensen and Raynor write. "Potentially innovative new ideas seem inexorably to be recast into attempts to make existing customers still happier. We believe that many of the ideas that emerge from this packaging and shaping process as me-too innovations could just as readily be shaped into business plans that create truly disruptive growth."

From the jacket:

Innovation fails ... because organizations unwittingly strip the disruptive potential from new ideas before they ever see the light of day

None of this is very surprising news, if you've read 'The Innovator's Dilemma' - more an extension of the underlying theoretical model coupled with some prescriptive suggestions. That said, I'm going to get the book and give it a read because I read the interesting excerpt that Rajesh Jain also linked to. The excerpt (in addition to featuring the nice Theodore Levitt quote: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.") presents a couple of interesting case examples and underlines the importance and limitations of product category definition:

Competing with nonconsumption often offers the biggest source of growth in a world of one-size-fits-all products... RIM got its disruptive foothold competing with nonconsumption by bringing the ability to receive and send e-mail to new contexts such as waiting lines, public transit and conference rooms. But what's next?

One option would be for RIM to believe its market is structured by product categories, as in: "We compete in handheld wireless devices." If so, they'd see the BlackBerry competing with the Palm handheld, Sony's Clié, mobile-telephone handsets made by Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, and Microsoft Pocket-PC-based devices such as Hewlett-Packard's iPAQ.

In order to get ahead of these competitors RIM would need to develop better products faster than the competition. Sony's Clié, for example, has a digital camera. Nokia's phones offer short text messaging. If it defines these as the competition, RIM would need to build some of these features into its next-generation BlackBerry device. RIM's competitors, of course, would be thinking just the same thing. Which would create a headlong, arms-race-like rush toward undifferentiated, one-size-fits-all products that perform poorly any specific jobs that customers might hire them to do. Such products are likely to end up more like the Swiss Army knife: a pretty good knife, terrible scissors, a marginal bottle opener and a crummy screwdriver.

But what if RIM structured the segments of this market according to the jobs that people are trying to get done? Just from watching people who pull out their BlackBerrys, it seems to us that most of them are hiring it to help them be productive in small snippets of time that otherwise would be wasted, like reading e-mails while waiting in line at airports.

What's the BlackBerry competing with? When not using a BlackBerry, people often pick up a wireless phone. Sometimes they pick up the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes they make notes to themselves. Sometimes they stare mindlessly at the CNN Airport Network or sit with glazed eyes in a boring meeting. From the customer's point of view, these are the BlackBerry's most direct competitors.

So in addition to adding wireless telephony, BlackBerry could add financial news headlines and stock quotes to help compete more effectively with the Wall Street Journal. And mindless, single-player games or automatically downloaded Letterman-like top-ten lists might help the BlackBerry gain share against boredom. Features that do not help customers do the job that they hire the BlackBerry for wouldn't be viewed as improvements at all.

My takeaway, though, is not that product categories are, in themselves, a bad way to think but rather that product categories need to be structured around what the customer is trying to get done. Narrow and obvious definitions of the product category can limit the market potential of a new product as well as its usefulness to its intended customers - thinking about the customer's needs and usage scenarios will lead to a better and more valuable reformulation of the product and its features and functionality. In the Blackberry case, substitute the more function-centric definition "on-the-road productivity enhancement tool" for the what-it-is-centric "handheld wireless device".

Passive radar

Gizmodo links to an interesting Business Week article on passive radar systems. These radar systems can detect and monitor moving objects (cars, planes, etc.) over hundreds of miles using the reflections of cellular, FM and TV broadcasts off their sides.

Passive or transmission-less radar has the following advantages over conventional radar systems: (1) it is impossible to detect, (2) the radar device can be very cheap since it does not need to incorporate a transmitter, (3) it does not require a license to transmit, (4) it can leverage the high-power, wide-coverage radio transmissions that are already occuring (FM, TV, cellular) as well as the network of already-deployed base-stations and towers.

Applications include surveillance, air- and ground-traffic monitoring, ground-based air defence and airborne applications. The article cites Celldar and Lockheed Martin's Silent Sentry, among others.

[continued below]

Three quotes from the article:

Despite Celldar's military potential, Lloyd predicts the first applications will come in the civilian sector. He says transportation officials are eager to use Celldar to monitor road traffic because it would avoid the expense of installing either sensors in roads or TV cameras overhead. And police cars equipped with Celldar could follow a car driven by a suspected crook or terrorist from a safe distance, without danger of being seen.

Lockheed-Martin's system is dubbed Silent Sentry. Last fall, in a demo for the U.S. Air Force, a third-generation Silent Sentry radar tracked all the air traffic over Washington, D.C., by picking up FM and TV echoes. Because FM and TV transmissions are more powerful than their cell-phone cousins, Silent Sentry can detect planes as far away as 135 miles, roughly 10 times the reach of an individual cell-phone tower.

John D. Sahr, a University of Washington electrical engineer, [...] has operated a passive-radar system unshrouded by military secrecy. It harnesses an FM station's signals to study particles in the ionosphere -- the top layer of the atmosphere, over 300 miles up. Sahr decided to go with passive radar, he says, "because it's incredibly cheap" -- $20,000 vs. $25 million for a comparable active system. "You could probably do an amateur system for under $5,000," Sahr adds. A system for small airports might cost as little as $15,000. That's important because of the 5,280 public airports in the U.S., only about 300 currently have radar.

Interview with NetGear CEO

Patrick Lo talks at News.com about the coming wave of WiFi integration into consumer electronic devices like MP3 players, TVs, etc. and predicts that there will be a big "retrofit" market for adding WiFi interfaces to legacy devices:

But again, there's a huge retrofit market. You could retrofit back for digital devices, such as gaming consoles, TVs and ordinary radios, using a digital media adapter so you can retrofit the old analog devices to connect to the Internet. We believe that will become big next year.

In discussing hotspot business models, he makes the interesting analogy between hotspot models today and the early days of ATMs:

I like to compare them to ATMs. People said, "Why should I pay to get my own money?" It was ridiculous, and the banks, 20 years ago, realized you just can't be competitive without ATM service. So over the years banks changed their views on ATMs. They were free, and then they charged for them, and then they were free again.

Now banks look at ATMs as a necessary customer-enhancing service to attract and retain customers, while other people are willing to spend $20,000 to $30,000 for a machine so they can to stick it in a grocery store and make a killing on charging fees. The industry found equilibrium, where ATMs would be a customer retention tool for some, while in other places people charged.

Another similar analogy I've heard is to parking spots - you go to a restaurant and you might spend say 15 minutes hunting for a free parking spot. Or, if you're in a hurry or want to avoid the headache, you might just pay for valet parking. The idea being that for-fee and for-free models will coexist.

(Link to the interview via Emergic.org)

Word of mouth: quantifying buzz

Interesting paper that quantitatively examines word of mouth (WOM) and its relation to future sales.

"[The] success of a product is related to the WOM that it generates. In fact, it is commonly believed that WOM directly impacts sales. It might affect awareness in some cases, or preferences in others. On the other hand, WOM may simply serve as a leading indicator of a product's success."

Whether word-of-mouth is a driver of sales or merely a leading indicator, it is clear that a firm introducing a new product ought to try to measure it. This paper examines two quantitative measures of word-of-mouth: volume and dispersion. Volume is simply the quantity of buzz (e.g, how many Usenet posts with “Blair Witch Project” on the subject line). Dispersion is a measure of how this volume of buzz is dispersed among disparate communities – for instance, if Resident Evil gets talked about only on rec.arts.erotica.milla.jovovich it has low dispersion whereas if it gets picked up by a variety of different user communities it might have a higher dispersion. The measure of dispersion is the familar entropy formula with p_i= proportion of posts on this show that appear in newsgroup i. The paper examines the hypotheses that higher volume and dispersion are correlated to higher future sales of the product.

In the context of this paper, the product category is new TV shows and "sales" are measured by Nielsen’s Ratings. It examines the correlation between word-of-mouth about the show in the online community (Usenet) and Nielsen’s Ratings for the show in subsequent weeks. The key findings are that (1) volume is not consistently associated with higher future sales, (2) higher dispersion is correlated to higher future sales, (3) the effect of dispersion decreases over time (which implies that WOM is particularly important early on in the product lifecycle).

See also the New York Times article that discusses this paper as well as my recent post on Book Watch, which also makes an attempt to glean information from online buzz. More on this subject later.

Netscreen acquires Neoteris for $245MM

Neoteris is a market leader in the SSL-based VPN space which is projected to grow to $600MM by 2006 (Infonetics Research report). SSL-based VPNs offer a client-free solution to secure remote access by terminating http sessions over SSL at a centrally-located SSL-based VPN appliance. SSL-based VPN solutions are expected to grow to become the dominant mode for secure remote access, the primary advantage over IPSec being the "client-free" nature of the solution. IPSec is expected to continue to be used for secure site-to-site applications (such as connecting branch offices).

See the press release and Netscreen's audio webcast for more details. Via Taaza.

Book Watch Plus

Book Watch Plus is a cool service that I discovered a while back. It uses the web services APIs of Amazon, Google and weblogs.com to create a powerful new application. It tracks all blogs that have changed in the last several hours, looks for links to Amazon books in the blog postings and creates a running Top Ten lists of books that are getting a lot of buzz in the blogging community. Using the Amazon and Google web services APIs, it pulls down product information, related news, etc.

Weblogs.com publishes a list of weblogs that have been updated in the last three hours - this list is published as XML and is queryable using XML-RPC or SOAP. Amazon's web services API allows for detailed product information to be pulled down using XML/HTTP or SOAP. Google allows searches to be performed using a SOAP API.

Also see the related Book Watch, Media Watch and AllConsuming and read related articles by Erik Benson and Tim O' Reilly.