Month: January 2013

Categories
3D Information Business Strategy

Disrupting How People Collaborate

I've recently co-founded with Ignacio Mondine a new company, Two Way View. Two Way View will develop, manufacture and sell new products that enable "Transparent Collaboration."

Transparent Collaboration is what people do when they use Two Way View products to share, annotate and modify data, co-surf or otherwise have an experience that combines the digital and physical worlds. You might think that I’m talking about Augmented Reality, and there are related concepts, but Transparent Collaboration products don’t overlay digital data on the physical world. They allow me to use the physical world, directly, by way of a light pen or my fingertips on the touch-sensitive screen, to modify the digital world in real time.

The crucial difference and where we are disruptive, as you can see in this video, is how Two Way View products also allow the two people who are sharing and collaborating to see one another in real size, see where the other is looking, and to work together only an arm's length away, just as if they were on opposite sides of the same sheet of glass.

It's the fusion of a digital white board and telepresence system.

No one has proven that people will change their behaviors to use it, but I'm really excited about the highly disruptive technology this company is bringing to market. We might be in the position described by Clayton Christensen in his now classic book, the Innovator's Dilemna.  The giant companies that currently provide telepresence–Cisco and Polycom–are feeling the slow down in sales but, more importantly, they may have neglected to continue innovating within their markets; an upstart with a different approach and higher value comes in.

What lessons can we use from Christensen's masterpiece? I found this short essay on TechCrunch and it helped me to formulate Two Way View's answers with respect to Christensen's four key takeaways:

  1. Understand what is the source of your disruption. Is it a new product or a new way to distribute an existing product? Two Way View will use, to the best of its ability, the existing IT and telecommunication products distribution channels to introduce at least one new product.
  2. Pay attention to opportunities in new distribution channels. Two Way View could also distribute its products outside the traditional telepresence channels and, as an OEM, go through vertical market distribution channels. We will explore it.
  3. Start by marketing to the group of customers for which the incumbent in your industry has the lowest margin or the lowest interest to defend. Two Way View is keen to explore the markets in which large, complex 3D models are common place. The "traditional" data collaboration systems may be inappropriate in these use cases and lack the human element of collaboration between creative professionals.
  4. Remember these lessons when you are at the top. Stay tuned!

We are going to make an impact in 2013!

Categories
Events Innovation

Sizing Up CES 2013

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) marketing team chose to brand CES2013 as the "world's largest CES-signinnovation event." With 1.92 million net square feet of exhibit space and over 150,000 visitors (half of whom could be Korean), it is indisputably the largest trade show. The word "Innovation" was on banners and headlines everywhere. My eyes rolled and I sighed in pain as I waited in long lines for everything. Despite the express service shuttle buses and the noise being made about driver-less automobiles (although Google was not exhibiting), no one has innovated a new way to move so many individual people easily through spaces of these sizes. Perhaps patience is a cultural virtue of companies that exhibit at CES.

Finally, when I dove into the middle of Central Hall, I found over-sized televisions and cameras, but not what I was looking for. I spent hours, crawling around the enormous, sprawling booths of the Japanese and Korean consumer electronics "gorillas" including Sharp, Samsung (clearly the largest presence at the show in terms of footprint), Panasonic, Sony, Canon, Mitsubishi, showing screens that would not fit in any Swiss dwelling. These were interspersed with slightly smaller but still outlandishly large booths of Polaroid (I thought they were out of business!), automotive companies (in North Hall),  HiSense and others. CNET published this album of photos taken in the biggest CES2013 booths.

Only a year before, in January 2012, many of these same companies were showing Augmented Reality-enhanced products. But, in 2013, AR was not in evidence. I looked at dashboards and windshields, tablets and camera viewfinders. A crowd gathered around the Vuzix booth where the M100 was being shown. Vuzix received some attention from the media (here and here), but we didn't learn or see anything new. Motorola Solution's HC1, a head-mounted computer aimed at people in construction trades, was reportedly being shown but I didn't find it. Intel's demonstration of Perceptual Computing was the highlight in Central Hall. In an interview with the BBC, Mooly Eden, president of Intel Israel speaks about how gestures, gaze and voice will replace the touch computer human interfaces we have today. Patient, perceptive people staffing information booths assured me that the strategic planners who decide what warrants showing at CES just had different priorities this year: these new computer human interfaces. In the LG Electronics stand I ignored the curved TV screens and, with a little effort, found gesture as the interface for AR-assisted dressing room solutions provided by Zugara. It looked precisely the same as when I saw it over two years ago. Contrary to plan and despite my interest in new mobile displays (Samsung was showing Youm, the flexible displays about which it has also spoken for several years), I didn't linger in the Samsung Electronics booth.

In South Hall the situation and my mood improved. Here, AR was a little more in evidence as were key enabling technologies. I caught up with Kopin showing the Golden-i solution that it has partnered with Verizon to provide for first responders. In the Qualcomm booth, Vuforia's news items covered their cloud-based service that now permits users to add their own content as targets in a mobile AR experience (for example, the ModelAN3D application) and new text (as opposed to "simply" image) recognition capabilities.The first application to be enabled with this feature, Big Bird's Words, helps users find and learn new words in their environment.

The crowds around NVIDIA's Project Shield were thick and the reviews by Slashgear, Wired, Mashable, Droid Life and others were enthusiastic, with only a few exceptions. It certainly merits the many awards received. Why doesn't NVIDIA make this the first big AR-assisted power gamer platform?

A little further I met Limitless Computing, a small company that escaped my attention before, even though it has been featured in the media showing its AR capabilities. It launched its VYZAR 2D and 3D AR engine for producing mobile AR experiences at CES but I'm not sure what it really does different from the SiteSpace 3D which is highly valuable for industrial AR use cases where Sketch up is used with KML. This merits further investigation. Limitless marketing folks need a tutorial in AR terminology.

South Hall is also where I found the AR-assisted games by Sphero which made it on the PC World editors list of the 10 best CES2013 technology products (in 31 slides), and on which virtual reality and devices for 3D experiences were also featured. I found it odd that the  night vision companies I found in South Hall had never heard of Augmented Reality!

I didn't have to explain mobile AR's benefits to the many young companies I found in CES2013's Eureka Park in the Venetian. There I met with folks from Innovega, Luminode, Precision Augmented Reality Works, 3DeWitt, among dozens of others. Of course, it was stimulating to see so many new products and people in such a short time, but there remains a lot of follow up before I can assess if CES2013 was truly worth the effort.

Categories
Business Strategy Events

The Horsemen from Above

As I prepare for CES2013, I have themes with which to search for companies I'll visit and to organize what I'll learn there. One of these filters I use when thinking about a company's relative importance is its size. Another is the value proposition (to me and to the world).

A third way to think of companies is their culture. This one goes in many dimensions (East/West, Open/Proprietary, Off the books R&D vs. InHouse, etc), and is the topic of this post because I read a piece posted yesterday on TechCrunch about the importance of Samsung Electronics.

It's no surprise that business culture is very closely tied to the culture in which the company's employees work and live. For most people who have not lived and worked there, Korean business culture is very difficult to decode. This summary, on a website for Danes working in Korea, really seems to capture the essence:

The Confucian mind-set is a fundamental part of Korean culture. In accordance with Confucian principles, people of higher rank or age are treated with an explicit respect, both socially and in business matters. Employees of Korean companies have a strong sense of loyalty towards their employer and in any situation of conflict they are expected to seek confirmation or take the side of the employer regardless of the logic behind the arguments.

Confucian emphasis on education can be felt throughout Korean society. Koreans are in general very well educated and attach much importance to academic excellence and degrees obtained. The admission examinations for Korean universities are important events as the result of the examinations determine the future of thousands of young Koreans. Networks established during the high-school and college years often play a big role in the following career and throughout life.

It seems that spirituality is a theme in this post!

In the New Testament, the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride white, red, black, and pale horses. They represent Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, respectively. In 2011, as some predicted the Apocalypse in 2012, the metaphor was used in the business and financial press to analyze the impacts of businesses on the future of technology.

The TechCrunch post suggests that Samsung Electronics is reaching the same level of importance in terms of influencing emerging technology  trends and developments as are Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook (some analysts I read on this topic do not include Facebook on the list and, in its place, have found IBM to be a top technology influencer in 2013). Hence, Samsung would be the fifth horseman. If the goal is to emphasize how important a company is on mobile platforms, then Samsung is more important than Amazon and this list could be kept to four. And, in terms of size, they hit the mark. The New York Times reports that Samsung will reach $8.3B in profits in the quarter that ended December 31, 2012.

The problem that Western analysts face in deciding where to position Samsung is that they have low insights into how the company has achieved its success to date, and what Samsung is planning. Given the difference in corporate culture, it is difficult, as difficult as predicting how spirituality impacts other domains, for those surveyed for these rankings to calibrate how Samsung will shape mobile platforms in the next 12 to 18 months.

While at CES, I will be spending a lot of time in the Samsung Electronics booth, as well as those of many other Asian companies, and will continue my quest to better understand how they, despite their business cultures being very different from American and European, are going to impact mobile business opportunities, particularly in Augmented Reality fields, in the next year.

Categories
2020 Augmented Reality

Viewing Small Parts of Big Data

2013 is only 32 hours "old." Can I view how my place on the planet has evolved in those hours? No.

I can't see how many people went skiing on the mountain at which I'm looking or what the temperature was (or is) as I walk along the edge of Lake Geneva. But the information is "there." The data to answer these questions are somewhere, already part of Big Data. Dawn of 2013 on Lake Geneva

It could be displayed on my laptop screen but I'm convinced it would be more valuable to see the same data on and in the world. It's getting easier with cloud-based tools to make small, select data sets available in AR view, but we are far from being surrounded in this data.

One of the issues stems from needing a human, a developer, to associate an action with every published data set. Click on the digital button to go to the coupon. Click on the flag to see the height of the mountain.

What if some data were just data? Could we, without associating an action to them, have data automatically made visible?

The high cost and effort still required to make "just data" about a user's context and surroundings accessible on the fly are major impediments to our being able to use the digital universe more fully. Overcoming these obstacles will require open interfaces, many of which could be defined by standards, upon which new services will be offered.

But there also must be deeper thought and research into how we are presented with data, what it looks like, and the dimensions of the data provided to us. What is the appropriate resolution? How do I adjust this?

These questions are not trivial. I'm disappointed that the new IDC study on Big Data in 2020 doesn't go into how we will visualize Big Data in the future. I hope a future study will examine how small a data set is still valuable to different tasks, different modes of a professional or consumer user. This research could help us better understand the Big Data opportunities as well as helping us better quantify the value of Augmented Reality.

Let's hope that we will see this topic raised by others (with the data to define it better) before the end of this young year!