One of the screenshots of Siri, answering strange requests. By thisismynext.com

Apple’s digital assistant Siri, which ships with the new iPhone 4S, has gotten a lot of attention the last few days. Initially the reaction to Apple’s new flagship phone wasn’t that enthusiastic. This all changed when people actually got the chance to test this new user interaction technology. An experiment, feeding Siri awkward requests, showed that she(*) can provide smart and funny responses. Further, Wired gave the iPhone4S a raving review, with Siri as its main reason. Together with Google Voice, Siri was heralded as the voice powered artificial intelligence that is ‘shaping up to become the next-generation user interface’.

The adoption of Siri as the next generation user interface

The use of voice to control devices could indeed provide a whole new level of ease-of-use, beyond the intuitive user interaction multi-touch provided us. However, that heavily depends on how well the voice recognition (from audio to words in a sentence), the natural language processing (the meaning of the sentence) and the inference of context is (e.g. what is the current context in terms of time, place, current activity of the user and how does it relate to the request?). If one of these processing steps fail (to often), users won’t get the desired result, leaving them frustrated and abandoning the technology.

However, if Siri really is as convenient as Wired’s review suggests, wide use of this technology can be foreseen, especially when the technology further matures in the future. If it works properly, the convenience it will bring to complete tasks fast (find information, book a flight, reserve a table in a restaurant, etc.) will compel many users to adopt it.

And if users want it, other manufacturers will come with their own version of a digital assistant. (By the way, this could spark a new ‘patent war’ in the future. I think all big industrial players have patents in the area of voice control systems.)

How Siri and her offspring will bring the semantic web to life

Currently Siri can only interact with one (?) external service, Yelp. Based on the concepts it understood from the voice command and the interpretation of what the request specifically is about it uses the Yelp API to e.g. find a restaurant.

Now, that’s a great deal for Yelp (and the businesses listed on it), likely it will see it’s service used much more extensively, implying more business. So in short Siri means business!

Since Siri must have an understanding of concepts and what a user request is about, in the future it could in principle use any service through an API. However, without semantics (information about the meaning) of what can be queried through an API this knowledge would need to be hardcoded, just like specific knowledge about the Yelp API must have been added to Siri. For Siri and other digital agents to make use of all the information and services on the web, leveraging its potential to its full extent, it would need information about the meaning of the content of web pages, the meaning of API calls it can make for specific service, what it gets back when calling APIs and how this information needs to be represented.

In short what Siri and her offspring would need is a semantic web, in its broadest sense. It would not only be useful to have information on what content of web pages mean, and how these different pieces of information and concepts are linked, it would also be useful to have semantics related to API calls of web services

So why would we all integrate semantics in to our web content and service APIs? That is a question that didn’t have a strong answer until now. I already gave my new answer earlier in this post: Siri means business! Sure, multiple businesses already saw the potential of the semantic web but I think that Siri and its future improvements and competitors could become the first Artificial Intelligent Agents that will be used on a scale unseen before and will prove a driving force behind businesses and individuals to together build the semantic web on large scale.

– Freddy Snijder

(*) Referring to Siri as a she feels completely natural to me, but that could be cultural bias. I don’t mean to offend anyone ;)

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and due to his return the (second) rise of Apple began. His return was around the same time I started my career. In the early days I was intrigued by how Apple designed computers in a different, more fun and stylish, way. But it wasn’t until the iPod with its easy to use scrolling wheel and (later on) the iTunes store, which gave the music industry a new business model for the 21st century, that my interest really started to grow. At that time I was already working for Philips Research for multiple years, mostly developing new technologies and application to make handling of digital media easier for consumers.

Having mostly worked in a high-tech environment, which wasn’t always successful in making innovations a success on the market, I realized that innovation is much more then developing new technology. So over these years, I got increasingly interested in the question: ‘how to develop and market new products and services that are truly successful in the market?’ Steve Jobs and the innovations he, together with the rest of Apple, envisioned and made such a huge success in the market have really helped me to get answers to this question or helped validate what I’ve learned through other experiences.

This list could have been much longer, but I decided to narrow it to the few items that immediately came to mind.

Have a vision

Innovation starts with a vision. Without a vision of what we need, why we need it and how, you don’t have a global direction to drive your innovation development forward and to make the right decisions what to do and what not to do. Without a vision you can’t explain the reasoning why you are creating what you want to create, you can’t inspire others to help you out and provide meaningful insight and knowledge.

If there is one man who drives innovation forward through vision it is Steve Jobs. In the video below he talks about the importance of vision and the importance of customer experience in it, which is also an item on this list.

You will be surprised how many companies are not led through a coherent vision (and mission), where people working in these companies are not aware (enough) of a vision top management sets out, or simply don’t share the same vision. This is a big innovation showstopper, especially in the long term.

Presentation & communication

Whether you want to involve others to help you realize an innovation or you want to launch your new product or service in the market, you need to be able present and communicate your ideas, your vision, your product in a persuasive way.

The story should be simple, concise and it needs to be presented with passion. If you can’t bring out the enthusiasm in others for what you want to make or want to sell, you’re in trouble.

There are very few speakers whom I’ve heard that can present as well as Steve Jobs. I love his 2007 keynote where he announces the first iPhone (direct link to video).

It’s about the end-user experience

In the end products and services are about the experience it provides to the user. This even goes beyond having a good feature set or a great ease of use: it’s about the emotions it elicits in us and how it connects to deeper aspirations we all have in life.

To be fair, many companies already try to have a focus on user experience. At the same time many don’t really succeed in creating a great user experience. In the first video in this post Jobs explains the importance to start with the customer experience and work your way backwards to end up at technology requirements. In the next item (identity) I embedded a video of Steve Jobs explaining this from a brand perspective.

Strong Identity

Having an engineering background this is not the first thing that came to me in the past when thinking about what makes innovation successful, but it is actually a very important topic. Without an outspoken identity, expressed through your products and through your communications with the outside world people can’t identify themselves with you and the products you want to bring to market.

Apple, with Steve Jobs at the helm, made very clear choices about what Apple stands for (‘People with passion can change the world for the better’, Think Different Campaign, 1997, see video below). What the overall ‘feeling’ is people should have using Apple products. What properties their products should have and what strategies to follow. For instance, it was chosen to create a closed system to ensure user experience, their business model and the business model for their (media) partners. You either like it or you don’t. Simplicity and user-experience were, as far as I know, always favored over more features and application scenarios. You either like it or you don’t. Apple favored a minimalistic design… You either like it or you don’t.

On a side note, this is why I think the Windows Phone OS could have a chance in the market. Its tile-based interface is so distinct; it gives identity to the phone. Ha! I guess you didn’t expect this here!

Below a great video in which Jobs talks about the Apple brand, its identity.

Innovation needs a multi-disciplinary & holistic approach

When you think about the reasons why the iPhone is such a successful product you will find that there is not one answer, there are multiple answers from different perspective. Is it the multi-touch user interaction? Is it because the iPhone is also a platform, giving room for others to innovate on top of it, through apps. Is it the iTunes and app store business model? Is it because they bought flash memory and other electronic components in huge bulks to keep the pricing low? Is it the marketing and hype created around the device? Is it because Apple has its own sales outlets, the Apple stores? I could go on for a while here.

The end conclusion is that all these aspects, routed in different disciplines matter. Even further, these different aspects build upon each other creating a ‘holistic whole’ that is the iPhone.

This insight has real consequences for how to develop new products and services: innovation development needs multidisciplinary teams, even in the earliest stages. It should continuously cycle through all the different aspects. Think design, marketing, business strategy, technology, value chain management, sales outlets, etc..

Innovation should not be completely user driven

It’s important to listen to users and learn from their feedback to improve your product. But in recent years I came to the conclusion that not everything in innovation development should be user-driven. You might try to get deep insights in to fundamental needs and aspirations of consumers and use that as inspiration for new meaningful products, but consumer won’t be able to tell you if these are the products they really want.

You, as the innovator, should have the vision of what the future needs will be and what means there will be available to create solutions that satisfies does needs. Apple showed that this is a strategy that works; start with your own vision and iteratively improve your product later on through feedback in the market.

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
– BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

Found on wired.com in a post published in 2006, ‘Steve Jobs’ Best Quotes Ever’.

Persistence & passion

Innovation is a tough game; there is no easy win. It needs a lot of persistence to fight your way through all the barriers you will encounter. The only way to do this is if you are passionate about what you want to achieve and if you are able to affect others with your passion.

Persistence and passion are at the core of Jobs’ personality in my humble opinion. Just consider his presentation, the Think Different campaign and his persistence to chase and realize his vision.

More

There is much more to learn from how Steve Jobs made innovation successful throughout his career. For instance, when it comes to the importance of focus, detail and timely execution, nurturing a start-up culture and seizing opportunities in a changing world instead of protecting old business models.

To put it in US president Obama’s words, with the passing away of Steve Jobs we lost a man that was “brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it”. But be assured, we will still be talking about Steve Jobs, his achievements and what we can learn from it long after this day.

– Freddy Snijder

When you click an article on The Times site you get confronted with the paywall

The Times paywall is now active, I read this morning in a short piece on The Next Web. You know what? I’m going to make a bold prediction about this (which I always love doing). Contrary to what many Internet experts say, this is going to work.

Really? Yes, really. Of course, the best way for news companies to go forward is to leverage networks. In my opinion news companies should become platforms, engines of news as you will. Such platforms can be used in all kinds of new ways by 3rd party applications through commercial APIs (paid for API access).

Let me explain this a little bit further. 3rd party apps could wrap the content in such a way that readers do want to pay for it and could create an infrastructure around it that also creates value, directly for readers but potentially also for advertisers.

An example of wrapping content that adds value for users is an iPad application that makes reading the content very convenient, which in turn represents value that readers can be willing to pay for. A good example of an existing iPad application is Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition. An infrastructure that 3rd parties could add is obviously a social layer on top of the news content. Social data generated in this layer can be leveraged to better recommend readers new news content but also to better target advertisement.

I think that an important property of this mode of operation is that a news-company-as-a-news-engine itself does not have it’s own site with content: the content is accessible via the ecosystem of 3rd party news applications; it’s these parties that pay a fee for news.

Of course, to brand themselves, news organizations can have their own sites and interactions with the outside world through social media. They can give background information about stories, their journalists, how they work, etc.: brand your news company by giving the employees (the journalists) more opportunity to engage with the outside world about their work.

Ok, so why is this back-to-the-20st-century paywall construction of The Times going to work now? Well, there are two reasons, of which the second one is the most important. First, The Times creates high quality content that is not easily repeated by others. Many readers (read here ‘many’ = ‘enough to pay the bills together with ad revenues’), specifically of the target audiences of The Times, won’t mind paying a small fee for it.

So, Mr. Snijder, aren’t you forgetting that we are living in the digital age, where all information can be copied for almost no cost? Well, it’s up to 35 degrees Celsius here in the Netherlands at this very moment, so focus is currently not my strong point, but just like many people ‘illegally’ copy music right now, there is also a substantial base of people who pay for music online! Sure, this won’t salvage news-as-cash-cows but I believe still a healthy business can be run like this, for now…

Which brings me to my second and most important reason: currently (as far as I know) there’s no news organizations, practicing high quality journalism, that use the kind of mode of operation as mentioned. So lower-cost, more convenient or more attractive alternatives might currently be limited for the specific target audiences of The Times.

But when finally (finally, finally!) the news industry starts to make the shift to the new reality of our networked society on a larger scale and distinguished news organization, targeting the same audiences, start to implement new modes of operation, better leveraging the network (for instance as outlined above), then The Times will need to catch up fast and also make the shift.

I know, it’s a bold prediction that my colleague bloggers might not like. But where’s the fun in following the herd? This is something I believe could realistically happen, change needs time. Obviously I hope that news organizations and media in general will start leveraging the power of networks much sooner, such we can tear down ‘the wall’ once and for all.

I’m Looking forward to hear your opinions. Oh, and if you have any references I should add to this post I would appreciate if you would let me know!

– Freddy Snijder

The summary of the interview with Steve Jobs at All Things Digital D8.

I just watched this 5 minute summary clip of an interview with Steve Jobs at D8, the eighth annual conference of All Things Digital, see also this post at TheNextWeb. In my opinion almost everything he says in this clip touches upon important principals of successful innovation and also relates to ‘the secrets’ of Apple’s success. Below I summarized what these principles are according to me and what Jobs said related to them.

Focus your resources, ride the proper technological waves

Spend your resources wisely: choose very carefully which technologies to adopt, in Job’s words, “technical vectors that have a future and that are headed up”. Some more what Job’s said about this was:

“Different pieces of technologies kind of go in cycles, they have their springs, summers and autumns … and then they go to the graveyard of technology… so we try to pick things that are in their springs”.

If you want your innovations to stay ahead of the curve and flourish in the market you need to adopt the technologies that allow you to piggy bag on its future advancements and adoption by others in market.

It will cost you an enormous amount of energy if you don’t focus, hence reducing your chance to be successful. Further, if you don’t choose carefully it can cost you a lot of effort to change the technological fundaments of your innovation. This would likely imply that you lose your position in the market you are in.

Listen but stick to your vision and convictions

Two important points in one: listen to your customers to develop your innovation and adapt it based on feedback from the market, but at the same time have a strong conviction about the why, what and how of your innovation and stick to it.

Some great quotes of Job’s about this:

“… Things [products] are packages of emphasis, some things are emphasized in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not be done at all in a product and so different people make different choices: if the market says we are making wrong choices we just listen to the market … “

but …

“… We have at least the courage of our convictions to say: ‘we don’t think this is part of what makes a great product, we are going to leave it out!’ That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do: is to try to make the best products we can, and if we succeed they’ll buy it and if we don’t they won’t, and it will all work itself out!”

User-driven innovation is a very important basis for developing successful innovations. It allows you to create products and services that clearly reflect user needs and delight users by optimizing its form, functions and the way you interact with it, within the intended context of use. As an example of an intended context of use, Steve Jobs for instance exemplified one for the iPad in his introduction presentation by demonstrating it sitting in a lounge chair.

Further, developing successful innovations is a highly iterative process where you not only learn how, for instance, you can build something from a technical perspective but also what (form, function, interaction) tweaks your product or service needs for users to be ‘delighted’ about using it. This iterative learning process continuous constantly, even long after your innovation has been launched in the market.

Having that said, it’s not always possible or favorable to try to grand end-users every wish. End-users do not run your company and aren’t working daily on your innovations so they usually can’t oversee the holistic whole of the innovation: how all the aspects of the innovation make it more than the sum of its parts and why all the strategic choices are made to grow and sustain the product or service innovation in the market on the long run.

But that doesn’t have to be a problem. Even more, if you can communicate a clear vision and why you stand by your convictions, users will not only understand this, they will actually highly appreciate it and possibly identify themselves with it.

Eventually this can turn users into evangelists of which Apple, not surprisingly, has many. There are multiple aspects to Apple’s success, to me Apple’s vision and courage to stand up for their convictions is one of them.

The founders of Soluto mention in the video interview by Robert Scoble that people tend to blame Microsoft Windows for the problem while actually it’s the 3rd party apps that drain resources and make the system unstable. That is definitely true, but what they don’t say is that the operating system itself doesn’t have to allow these apps to cause these problems in the first place.

For sure there is ample opportunity to innovate operating systems such that applications can’t hog resources the way they do and users have more clear and understandable control, all by design of the OS; on the level of business models, technical architecture, resource management and user interaction.

It’s great that through Soluto Microsoft Windows users could challenge the industry to give them a better experience, but we didn’t have to get into this situation in the first place. Do we want to continue the Microsoft Windows hegemony by using a service like Soluto and just hope for change? Or should we just ditch this productivity draining OS (this is my personal experience) all together and use all the great alternatives out there & invent a better personal computing future without it?

I already opted for the second.

As usual, this post is quite long, so I listed URLs to the sections below for easy navigation:

• It’s the computing usability perspective that counts in this decade
• Digital media consumption made easy?
• Awakening the digital nomad in all of us
• Could future Google Chrome OS devices be a match for Apple’s iPad?
• Will iPad kill eReaders (Kindle)? Yes and No, resulting in a final No.
• Will the iPad save the traditional print media business? Depends.
• The rocky road ahead for iPad and future competitors
• The iPad is a revolution in disguise because …

Since I noticed a change to a more favorable tone yesterday in the blogosphere, and my own writings on Twitter (Thursday the 28th Jan. 2010) about the iPad are a bit abstract (see below), I thought is was high time to further elaborate my thinking about Apple’s iPad.

[translated from Dutch]
dutch| http://bit.ly/bcrlre cont’d : [With the iPad, Apple wants to bring 'personal computing' to a larger audience] cc @frankmeeuwsen 12:14 PM Jan 28th from TweetDeck

[translated from Dutch]
ducth| http://bit.ly/bDo2Ub cont’d: [It’s not about this 1st iPad, it’s about the ‘roadmap’; we will see new features in the future] 12:17 PM Jan 28th from TweetDeck

Don’t be too sure, iPad is a revolution in disguise RT @steverubel Google Social Search … far more important game-changing news than iPad 12:21 PM Jan 28th from TweetDeck

http://bit.ly/cm13vp cont’d : Agree, the iPad caters our future nomadic & comfort computing needs cc @davidcushman @miralize @damienmulley 1:16 PM Jan 28th from TweetDeck

http://bit.ly/9yscQo cont’d: The iPad is not about now, it’s about setting the stage for a personal computing future 1:22 PM Jan 28th from TweetDeck

I hope you enjoyed this hyper-lengthy post. I’m looking forward to your feedback! Also let me know if I need to add a specific link to a topic I touched upon that someone else wrote a good post about.