VenChar

Gyaru-moji

Seen on Japan.com (via Smart Mobs):

In the GSM world, youths often use an abbreviated language to reduce the time and effort to type an SMS message. Japanese girls, however, now prefer to communicate amongst each other using special characters that require more time to input. These characters are called "gyaru-moji" (gyaru is the slang word for girl). The words made from gyaru-moji are a mixture of Japanese syllables, numbers, mathematical symbols and Greek characters. It's like a secret code used by teenagers; at first glance, the code resembles hieroglyphics.

Typing gyaru-moji takes at least twice as long as inputting standard Japanese. When we asked a Japanese girl in Shibuya about gyaru-moji, she told us that she likes to use them because it makes her emails look more artistic. "Plus," she added, "people who want to read over my shoulder cannot understand gyaru-moji, and in this way we keep our group language." For those people not familiar with gyaru-moji, several mobile and Web sites offer conversion tools from normal written Japanese to gyaru-moji.

Recently a new trend to send personalized messages was introduced by these girls. They do not send emails to friends anymore. Instead, they jot down their message on a piece of paper, take a photo of it and send it as a picture message to their friends.

Neat. One of my frustrations with text-messaging has been how painful it is to type stuff using a phone keypad. I tried out writing a message down on paper, capturing the image and sending it. You can see how well it works (despite the low resolution of my cameraphone) here. Now, it would be nice if textamerica also did OCR on the image and sent out a text email to the intended recipient.

Currents of thought on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle

I had discussed the acceleration of the product lifecycle in a previous post, drawing on the adoption cycle for DVDs and WiFi as examples. Recently, I've seen a couple of discussions that suggest that the Technology Adoption Lifecycle has changed in fundamental ways in recent times. Both start out from the observation that the adoption curve has steepened - an observation founded on the rapid uptake of DVDs, Wi-Fi and cameraphones.

Umair Haque at Bubble Generation challenges the assumption that the needs of Pragmatist customers differ significantly from those of Early Adopters and that the discontinuity in adoption profiles between these classes of consumers that characterize the chasm exists any more.

The disappearance of the chasm is really about a discontinuity in consumer needs for technology goods, which destroys all of the old distinctions that adoption segmentation was based on. There might have been a chasm between the needs of ‘innovators’ and ‘pragmatists’ before – but now, consumer needs have shifted because of technological discontinuities and ruptures in market dynamics. This shift in consumer needs in effect renders all of the old adoption segments irrelevant. In effect, it turns everyone into part innovator and part pragmatist.

He identifies the drivers behind this shift:

There are three fundamental drivers of acceleration in adoption, which are interrelated: the Net, interconnectivity, and hypercompetition. The Net’s impact is easy to understand, though most marketers still try their best to discount it: it enables people to get the information they need about which goods meet their needs much faster and cheaper than was possible before. At the same time, it enables everyone to become part innovator, because they can easily find simple hacks, tweaks, plug-ins and add-ons for the goods that they buy. Hypercompetition, which is in part enabled by the Net, Because hypercompetition increases the potential search costs consumers face in finding goods which they derive value from, it turns everyone into a pragmatist –they simply don’t have the time to play with all of the various goods and service available to them.

Finally, interconnectivity is about complementarity. Many technological goods can be connected to – and are often dependent on – a broad range of other technology goods. Interconnectivity drives accelerated adoption because people realize combinatorial benefits from interconnected technology goods – and conversely, realize little benefit from disconnected goods. Interconnectivity lets everyone be a pragmatist and an innovator simultaneously – by combining and recombining goods in different ways, to realize pragmatic benefits through user innovation. At the same time, interconnectivity means that those rare goods which meet shifted consumer needs become even more valuable – because their value is driven in larger and larger part by other goods consumers already possess.

He argues for a segmentation into three broad classes - pre-adopters, mass market and post-adopters. The first two categories, he says, are distinguished not by their requirements of the product so much as by the timing of their adoption of the technology (which is driven, basically, by the pre-adopters being more plugged in to what's new/hot). he points out WiFi an DVD adoption as examples: "What didn’t drive [adoption across the pre-adopter and mass market segments] so much was whether or not firms provided you high technology or low technology. In fact, for these two goods, there was no high or low technology." Not sure if I agree with the WiFi example. Before MSFT integrated WiFi into the OS with XP, it was actually a real pain in the ass to get a wireless card and install a driver for it, configure wireless settings and get on the network - even so there were early adopters who were willing to go through that drudgery. Now, of course, it's mindlessly simple.

Haque goes on to argue that accelerating technology adoption is creating a trend towards winner-take-all markets:

Accelerated adoption is helping turn most technology markets into winner take all markets. All of the same old mechanisms fueling positive feedback are still around – network effects, early mover advantages, scale economies – but accelerating adoption means that successful technologies will be picked up ever more quickly, and so will also be harder for competitors to displace. Conversely, the steepening of the adoption curve highlights the time-sensitive nature of technology markets.

Over at VentureBlog, Andrew Anker is also thinking about the accelerating pace of adoption, and what it implies. His conclusions (to summarize) are the following:

*The product uptake curve is accelerating
* The laggard market is disappearing
* New products will either open big or get killed early
* It's not about technology any more
* Early adopters will become a big enough group to serve on their own

Some of these observations/conclusions parallel those of Haque, while some are different. Both agree that (1) technology adoption is accelerating, (2) that tech products are moving towards hit-driven, winner-take-all models, (3) early adopters are becoming a big segment on their own and their needs are not so different from those of the mass market. Again camera phones and DVD players are cited as examples of these trends.

The examples used in the analyses are drawn almost exclusively from the consumer electronics arena. Do these shifts in the adoption lifecycle also apply to other categories of products or industries? I'm not convinced that, for instance, enterprise software or infrastructure products face an adoption landscape in which the needs of early adopters mirror those of the pragmatist customers who desire, above all else, referenceability and evidence of market share. That said, I can see why the drivers Haque identifies: interconnectivity, hypercompetition (driven in turn by effects such as standardization, which reduces barriers to entry and lowers costs to the end consumer) and the Net are (a) speeding adoption, (b) erasing the distinction between the needs of early adopters and pragmatists in the _consumer products markets_.

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.