"Age of context" a post from +Robert Scoble #tl
Originally shared by +Robert Scoble
Reprinted: Life and Tech #7: Learnings from the Age of Context
This email newsletter was sent out May 21st. Every week I email out a newsletter named "Life and Tech." You can subscribe here:http://eepurl.com/bjalx5
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Two years ago Shel Israel and I were putting the final touches on our book, “Age of Context.” We tried to predict where the mobile world would go (and since mobile is how many humans connect to the Internet, has a big impact on the future of business).
What are contextual systems? They are ones that change depending on the users’ context. You know, your mobile phone and watch should behave differently depending on whether you are in a business meeting, watching a movie, exercising, dancing at a night club, or eating a meal. Doing that would require gathering data from email, from calendar, from searches, from sensors you are wearing and holding or walking near. When we wrote the book, Google Now had already been out for a few months. I thought it was the beginning of a new wave of computing.
Right after the book went to press Bluetooth Smart Low Energy Beacons went live (most of the press called them iBeacons, after Apple’s marketing and software layer on top of these little radios, but that wasn’t correct). These little radios spit three numbers into the air. Your phone can tell how close it is to them. They cost less than $10 each in quantities. Run on small batteries for longer than a year.
I thought we had totally nailed a new trend and that we’d look like brilliant futurists, predicting a crazy always-surveilled big data future.
That fantastic future largely hasn’t shown up, though.
Perfect example – Google Glass. Our cover has a guy wearing a pair. They certainly haven’t proven to be popular on the street. Another great example — beacon technology. The beacon/contextual world largely hasn’t shown up, despite Coachella having 160 of them on the field during its music festival.
Why not?
Well, after every speech I’ve given since then, where I detail all the fantabulous things that are happening, where even baby bottles have sensors in them, I ask the audience “how many of you are freaked out by this new world?” It’s consistent that 1/3rd of the hands go up. That attitude toward privacy is borne out by this Pew Report: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-about-privacy-security-and-surveillance/
When working on the book I thought that utility would solve this problem and would convince people to jump on board. That hasn’t proven true in a major way and it’s leading to a new divide between people who are “all in” and people who are resisting this new “always watching” technology.
It also is leading tech companies like Apple, to ignore contextual technology. The Apple Watch, for instance, doesn’t behave differently depending on where you are, which is a real shame because it keeps lighting up even when I’m in a movie.
My opinion matches Sam Song Liang’s. He writes, on my Facebook post where I ask about lessons learned from the Age of Context, “On privacy, a simple question I ask people is this: compared to 30 years ago, before Google, Facebook, mobile phones, do people have more or less privacy now? Do most people prefer the life now or 30 years ago?” https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153290494034655
Privacy attitudes aren’t the only retardant that’s holding back big-data innovation.
This report on retail beacons gives some others: http://readwrite.com/2015/05/21/retail-beacons-long-way-to-go Turns out it’s hard to provide real utility in an app-siloed world. Why? Well, can, say, your Starbucks app really interoperate with the databases inside Facebook? No.
…and why not? Because while Facebook does gather a TON of data about where you are reading it, and who you are, it has actually moved to close down APIs instead of opening them up thanks to those privacy fears.
Also, the operating system itself just isn’t opening up like I had hoped it would on both Android and Apple’s mobile OS’s. On Apple, developers still can’t talk to the dialer, nor the wifi radios, in a real way that would allow better contextual apps to be built. Yes, there are companies like NewAer who are trying to provide radio-based context.
Go back to the learnings from Coachella about beacons, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUJ8Hu-KELs&feature=youtu.be
First you have to get someone to load your app. Then you need to get them to turn on Bluetooth (which means they need to think about battery life and privacy). Then you need them to turn on notifications, which, in the best of cases, will mostly be informative and have utility. But as my Apple Watch is teaching me, most notifications are spammy intrusions into what you are trying to do.
That’s a lot that’s holding back our age of context.
Why do I say that there’s a new divide? Well, I was at a “Live in the Vineyard” concert in Napa last year. Sitting next to me was an insurance salesman from Chicago who didn’t know who I was. I started talking to him about his new Samsung phone and he said “I love Google Now. The more I tell it about myself, the more it helps me.”
Just look at the sentiment around Facebook Messenger here: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153289914964655 Some, like me, really love the app. Others are very afraid of it and refuse to use it. I don’t know how this divide gets settled, but it is something to note for those of us who are building technologies for our companies.
In talking with my friends and people in the tech industry, there are fans of this new “give a bunch of data over to companies so they can do stuff with it for us” world. But there aren’t enough cases to get most people over into this world and our fears hold us back.
Other lessons? In the Internet of Things world there are still multiple standards that are being discussed/decided on, and hooking up to them is taking unique technology that costs. I visited Golgi.io to see its new system that makes building apps for mobile/IoT connections much easier: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/10153288810404655/
Also, this week I visited Wearable World, to get a good feel for the state of that market in the post-Apple watch era. I agree with Francine Hardaway’s wrap up, here:https://medium.com/@hardaway/wearables-still-waiting-for-their-day-in-the-consumer-sun-5d1a774f1f54 It seems a lot of the excitement has left the building, but there are still a bunch of companies slogging it out, building new sensors and trying to find new, as yet unserved, markets. That said, our short attention spans have moved onto sexier things like virtual reality, drones, and robots. Last weekend I took my family to the very crowded 10th Annual Maker Faire. The most crowded booth? It was the “Game of Drones” booth where they were fighting drones.
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Industry prepares for Oculus.
Consumer cam. $499. https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/10153292310039655/ Giroptic.
Pro cam system. Up to $1 million for a sports stadium. https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/10153290637224655/ 3D-4U.
Why do I care so much about 360-degree cameras and virtual reality headsets? Because they blow me away. I think the rest of you will see what I’m talking about next year.
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OpenStack had its big summit this week and here’s Rackspace’s architect Adrian Otto and others talking about new container support. The future of the cloud is containers and this video shows off what’s changing. https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153290664189655
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Will Uber bans lead to a new political movement?
In San Antonio the city banned Lyft and Uber. This week 700 people showed up to see if they could get support for technology and entrepreneurial-support initiatives. http://therivardreport.com/satechbloc-draws-huge-launch-crowd-to-pearl/ I think this is very positive. Everytime I see a city ban Uber I think “there’s corruption.” Certainly not taking a point of view that’s very consumer focused. I hope this effort bears some fruit.
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I read all my email at scobleizer@gmail.com and anything done in response to this newsletter goes to the top of my inbox. I’m also at +1-425-205-1921 or on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble. Please let me know how I, or Rackspace, the leading managed cloud company, can be of service to you. Thanks too to Hugh Macleod and team for helping me do art each week for this. We love his work!
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