The Fu­ture Of Busi­ness And Marketing

My book re­view of Age of Con­text, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

In 1973, when I was a kid, our black-and-white TV had 3 chan­nels. We had no com­puter, no mo­bile phone, no in­ter­net. Even VCRs didn’t show up in people’s homes be­fore 1975.

30 years later, in 2003, VCRs were al­ready on their way out. 2003 - that was just 10 years ago.

We had no Face­book, no Twit­ter, nei­ther iPhone nor iPad . Most house­holds were on dial-up in­ter­net, you could for­get about watch­ing videos, and YouTube didn’t exist.

At the be­gin­ning of 2003 there was no Google Ad­Sense, no Word­Press, no Skype, no MySpace.

Pres­i­dents couldn’t win elec­tions via Face­book, and gov­ern­ments weren’t top­pled via Twitter.

Pause for a mo­ment, read the last 3 para­graphs again, and get a feel­ing for the change that has hap­pened in just 10 years.

We tend to make our plans and pro­jec­tions as if things were sta­ble. But they’re not!

1. A lot has hap­pened from 2003 to 2013. Com­pare, if you’re old enough, to the change from 1973 to 1983. It’s a joke. It’s like we’d been liv­ing in su­per-slow-mo­­tion back then.
2. In­creas­ing speed of change is a given. That means:
3. A lot more will hap­pen in the next 10 years than has hap­pened in the pre­vi­ous 10 years. In your life and in your busi­ness, no stone will be left unturned.

This is what the book “The Age of Con­text” is about.

Book Re­view: The Age of Con­text, by Robert Scoble & Shel Israel

In July 2012 Robert Scoble and Shel Is­real started to work on their book “The Age of Con­text.” It’s about how pre­vi­ously dis­con­nected tech­nolo­gies come to­gether and bring mas­sive change to our lives and busi­nesses, at a pace never seen in hu­man history.

The au­thors are two vet­eran Sil­i­con Val­ley jour­nal­ists, Robert in the area of tech­nol­ogy, Shel in the area of busi­ness. It’s their 4^th book together.

Robert Scoble and Shel Is­real funded the book with $ 100,000 from spon­sors, so they could re­search cur­rent trends, in­ter­view the trend set­ters, and write the book as fast as possible.

“We have found over 100 de­vel­op­ers of new con­tex­tual tech­nolo­gies rang­ing from tiny star­tups to some of the world’s biggest companies.

We’ve also started to un­cover some amaz­ing sto­ries that in­volve con­tex­tual foot­ball fans, so­cial net­works be­tween tech­ni­cians and jet en­gines, geo fenc­ing en­tire tourist re­gions and the de­signs of en­tire con­tex­tual cities.”

Don’t be put off by the geeky word “con­tex­tual.”

It’s hard to think of a more bor­ing word than con­tex­tual, and the au­thors could sell twice as many books with a catch­ier title.

But you bet­ter get used to the word. „Con­text” is where all big tech com­pa­nies are putting their money right now.

It means that tech­nol­ogy tries to un­der­stand in which con­text you are ac­tu­ally us­ing the tech.

• Search en­gines try to un­der­stand in what con­text you are search­ing for a spe­cific key­word. De­pend­ing on what Google knows about you and your cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, you’ll get dif­fer­ent an­swers for your search.
• Mo­bile tech con­sid­ers where you are be­fore of­fer­ing its services.
• Apps are col­lect­ing data about you, and use the data to de­liver more per­son­al­ized services.

If this is still a bit ab­stract to you, don’t worry.

Age of Con­text is chock-full with ex­it­ing ex­am­ples how your con­text (where, when, your so­cial con­nec­tions, info about your health, info about your in­ter­ests, and much more) will be used by tech­nol­ogy and ser­vices to de­sign your experiences.

From a busi­ness per­spec­tive the ques­tion is: how does con­tex­tual tech­nol­ogy change the way you get cus­tomers, you de­liver our prod­ucts or ser­vices, you mar­ket your business.

The changes ahead are too mas­sive to ignore.

You’re prob­a­bly al­ready over­whelmed by what’s go­ing on today.

• You’re sup­posed to en­gage on umpteen so­cial me­dia sites.
• You’re sup­posed to build a cus­tomer and a prospect list, and do email marketing.
• It’s not enough to have a web site. You also need a mo­bile ver­sion. And you’re sup­posed to add con­tent to a gazil­lion con­tent plat­forms, and send guest post to other blogs.
• SEO is dri­ving you nuts.
• Oh, and by the way, you ac­tu­ally have to find time to work on your core busi­ness. That is: ful­fill your prod­ucts and services.

Start­ing from that over­whelm, the Age of Con­text is a dou­ble sided sword: It’s ex­cit­ing to see the pos­si­bil­i­ties of things to come. At the same time it’s scary to see how much more com­pli­cated things are go­ing to be pretty soon.

My biggest sur­prise with the book was how far these tech­nolo­gies are al­ready de­vel­oped. The book is not about things that are go­ing to hap­pen in 10 or 20 years. It’s about things that are hap­pen­ing TODAY, that you just may not have heard of yet.

The Five Forces

The main dri­ver of rapid change is the com­ing to­gether of 5 forces that we al­ready use every day:

Mo­bile de­vices + so­cial me­dia + lo­ca­tion + sen­sors + data.

What’s new is that these 5 forces are now con­nected via cloud ser­vices. And that ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence is reach­ing a level where these 5 forces can be com­bined in an au­to­mated and in­tel­li­gent way that was not pos­si­ble before.

This will also help you to con­nect with your cus­tomers in en­tirely new, ex­cit­ing ways.

You’re well aware how mo­bile de­vices and so­cial me­dia have changed our every­day lives.

When it comes to con­text, both pro­vide an enor­mous amount of in­for­ma­tion about you, which con­tex­tual tech­nol­ogy will use.

Your mo­bile knows where you are, and how fast you are mov­ing. It knows your con­tacts, knows which apps you are us­ing. It’s also where most people’s so­cial me­dia ac­tiv­ity is happening.

“So­cial me­dia is es­sen­tial to the new Age of Con­text. It is in our on­line con­ver­sa­tions that we make it clear what we like, where we are and what we are look­ing for.”

Plus, there’s tons of other in­for­ma­tion that has been col­lected about you: fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion, your credit score, so­cial se­cu­rity num­ber, credit card pay­ments, job his­tory, and so on.

All this data is now, for the first time in his­tory, be­ing brought to­gether through ser­vices talk­ing to each other on­line, in real-time!

A tiny, but for busi­nesses ex­tremely im­por­tant, piece of this data is your lo­ca­tion. Peo­ple have ac­cepted the fact that your phone is an­a­lyz­ing where you are lo­cated. Lots of great ser­vices are based on this tiny piece of information.

Map ser­vices. Ho­tel rec­om­men­da­tions. Faster pizza delivery.

The shocker is that it now all hap­pens au­tomag­i­cally and be­tween con­nected devices. 

In the past most in­for­ma­tion col­lected about us was still pro­vided by humans.

• By your­self on so­cial me­dia. In your emails. On your web site.
• By em­ploy­ees from busi­nesses, or­ga­ni­za­tions, and agen­cies. They had to en­ter your data into their com­put­ers man­u­ally.

Not so in the era of sen­sors.

We carry with us, and are sur­rounded by, an ar­se­nal of tech­ni­cal sen­sors. They are able to col­lect tons of in­for­ma­tion about us and au­to­mat­i­cally add it to the pile of data about us.

It’s ob­vi­ous that your car and your phone have sen­sors to know your location.

But did you know this?

“Mi­crosoft Kinect for Xbox … has a 3D sen­sor that can see your heart­beat just by look­ing at your skin.”

Scary, isn’t it?

Or, did you know there are pills that can sense and in­form your doc­tor whether you have eaten them or flushed them down the toilet?

It’s not sci­ence fiction!

Mo­biles have more com­put­ing power than a PC had just a few years ago.

Ac­tual PCs are be­ing re­placed by tablets, which are mo­bile, too.

Plus, we’ll soon see new types of mo­bile de­vices com­ing to mar­ket. For ex­am­ple Google Glass and com­put­er­ized glasses from other com­pa­nies. Or smart-watches. A few sim­ple smart-watches are al­ready avail­able today.

These new tech­nolo­gies will ma­ture faster than, for ex­am­ple, the first mo­bile phones did. They will also be adopted by the masses much faster.

It’s im­por­tant to un­der­stand this.

Imag­ine, for a mo­ment, a fu­ture where com­put­er­ized glasses are used by as many peo­ple as mo­biles and tablets today.

Can you imag­ine that?

Guess what, your en­tire on­line mar­ket­ing strat­egy, which worked so well in 2013, just vaporized!

I don’t know if it’s the glasses who will re­place smart phones. But in a few years the mo­biles we use to­day will be re­placed by some­thing en­tirely dif­fer­ent. Smaller. Smarter. Voice based.

The new tech­nolo­gies will change how you run your busi­ness, what­ever that busi­ness might be.

They’ll also en­able en­tirely new types of busi­nesses, new types of pay­ment, new ser­vices, and new products.

Too much to cover in this review!

What I’ve talked about so far merely cov­ers the first chap­ter of “The Age of Context!”

I’m not giv­ing you the whole book in this post, only high­light­ing a few more topics.

One of the 13 chap­ters, the con­tex­tual self, talks about sen­sor based health tech­nol­ogy.

Fit­bit and Nike Fu­el­band are just the tip of the ice­berg. I found that chap­ter par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing. It’s amaz­ing to see what com­pa­nies are work­ing on to im­prove our health!

How Peo­ple Live And Work And Do Busi­ness: The New Urbanists

Chap­ter 6, the new ur­ban­ists, in­tro­duces an­other fas­ci­nat­ing trend.

“Cites are grow­ing younger and more af­flu­ent, while sub­urbs are shrink­ing, ag­ing and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing in­creases in poverty.”

A new gen­er­a­tion is re­vers­ing the trend to mi­grate out of the cities. They come back into the cites, and they do so well con­nected with the lat­est tech­ni­cal gad­gets and con­tex­tual devices.

The quote from Age of Con­text in the im­age be­low hints at how the ur­ban life is com­pletely trans­formed by con­tex­tual tech­nol­ogy. And, of course, your house will be man­aged by con­tex­tual technology.

Your busi­ness is em­bed­ded in this chang­ing world – and will adopt.

Pri­vacy Is Futile

Sev­eral times in the book Scoble and Is­rael talk about pri­vacy, in­clud­ing one chap­ter en­tirely de­voted to pri­vacy prob­lems and trust is­sues. They re­view the pros and cons of con­tex­tual tech­nol­ogy and data collection.

I’m not sure if the au­thors truly care so much about pri­vacy, or if they only in­cluded the chap­ter to pre­vent a back­lash. A ‘po­lit­i­cal cor­rect­ness’ chap­ter, so to speak.

The core of the mat­ter: Each and every piece of tech, and all the ser­vices and busi­nesses you are us­ing, are col­lect­ing data on you. And they don’t keep the data for them­selves, they gen­er­ously share it.

Peo­ple could be an­gry of fear­ful about that, but for prac­ti­cal pur­poses most peo­ple don’t care. They’d close their Face­book ac­count in a sec­ond, if pri­vacy were truly important.

To make a long story short:

Pri­vacy is a thing of the past!

Big data is col­lected and con­nected, and there’s noth­ing you and I can do about it.

Im­pli­ca­tions for your business

This “un­stop­pable per­fect storm of epic pro­por­tion” will not stop to spare your busi­ness. As the world changes, the way you do busi­ness changes.

Each of the 13 chap­ters shows ideas how con­tex­tual tech­nol­ogy and the 5 forces are chang­ing the world. Through­out the book you’ll find many ex­am­ples for busi­nesses us­ing con­tex­tual technology.

And lots of ex­cit­ing in­ven­tions: Google glass. Self dri­ving cars. Health mon­i­tor­ing tatoos. In­tel­li­gent mir­rors. Ro­botic house­hold as­sis­tants. Self clean­ing clothes.

2 chap­ters talk specif­i­cally about how the Age of Con­text changes cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence , busi­ness trans­ac­tions, and marketing.

Chap­ter 3, the cus­tomer in con­text, cov­ers a wide range of new busi­ness ap­pli­ca­tions. From re­tail, to sports sta­di­ums and Dis­ney. Travel, restau­rants, cabs, and more.

Chap­ter 11, pin­point mar­ket­ing, is about – you guessed it - us­ing con­tex­tual tech in mar­ket­ing. Will ad­ver­tis­ing soon be his­tory? Re­placed by new busi­ness models?

These 2 chap­ters alone are worth buy­ing the book.

Should YOU buy this book?

If you’re a tech en­thu­si­ast or early adopter, you won’t need con­vinc­ing. You’re prob­a­bly not even read­ing this be­cause you have long clicked through to Ama­zon to buy the book.

But what if you’re not a geek?

Is this book for you?

I say: it’s a must.

We talked about how much has changed in the pre­vi­ous 10 years. 

• No book would have been able to pre­dict those changes.
• The next 10 years will be more dis­rup­tive than the last 10 years.
• The book is only in­clud­ing what we al­ready know. It can’t even hint at the surprises.

If you have been over­whelmed by the past and present, pre­pare your­self for the storm that’s com­ing. It’s amaz­ing, but it’s also stress­ful for us busi­ness own­ers to adopt.

Be­sides, the book is EASY to read, and – thanks to the many real-life-ex­am­­ples, very in­ter­est­ing. Top­ics change so fast, it never gets boring.

Could I find some­thing neg­a­tive to say about the book? Sure, but it doesn’t mat­ter a bit.

What mat­ters is the big pic­ture. And un­der­stand­ing where the world you live in is headed. And “The Age of Con­text” de­liv­ers ex­actly that!