The other day I was at the mall and visited a clothing store. Walking inside I noticed a line formed in front of the dressing rooms. Here we had a bunch of customers who were wasting their time waiting to get into the dressing room rather than perusing the clothes and accessories being sold by the retailer. What a great wasted opportunity.
What if they had an app that customers could download and use it to reserve the dressing room. If no room was available, they would be put on a waiting list and pinged when one came available. This would allow the customer to roam around and shop for more things. Once the retailer's app is installed on the customer's mobile device, and once the customer logs into the app, the retailer will have all the customer's information so the app can provide tips or sales information to the customer based on her/his taste.
This would not only provide a pleasant experience to the shopper but also help the retailer maximize the customer's time in the store. Which retailer would want a shopper standing in line rather than browsing the aisles and picking up products to purchase?
Amazon Echo has been the face of Alexa all these days and it is a hands-free speaker that you control with your voice. It also acts as a virtual voice-controlled assistant with limited capabilities.
Amazon released Alexa API to developers for free and developers are flocking to it. This is a great move by Amazon and this will herald a new wave of applications that make use of Alexa. And the Alexa Champions Program was put in place to recognize creative and outstanding contributions to the ecosystem.
Alexa has been seen as a way to enter into everyone's living room and as an assistant for the home. Even the Alexa Home Kit is geared towards helping create home based custom skills. This is all good. But, the next generation of skills are going to empower the enterprise.
Imagine walking into a sporting goods store and wondering where to find running shoes. You walk up to a virtual assistant installed strategically on every pillar/corner and speak to it and ask your question. It can then reply with the exact location of the running shoes. A custom skill could be created to go into the store database and check the location of the product in question, verify its location on the store planogram and return the location for the virtual assistant to voice. The database and its information should be store specific.
Taking it to the next level, imagine a virtual assistant answering questions about a product. All the information about the product, its reviews, etc. are available and can be piped into the assistant without any human intervention. Custom skills can be built to work with the store database. In cases where the answer is not found or the question is not understood, the virtual assistant can page for a human assistant.
The next generation of Human Computer Interaction is already here: It is voice based. We still have a long way to go before computers can read our minds (think, Firefox, the movie). We do live in interesting times.
Update: With Echo Show, the enterprise use case is strengthened. In the above sports store scenario, Echo Show can display the store planogram/plan and show the user how to reach the product of interest. It can also display additional information (choices, etc.) on the product as well.
Amazon has finally done it. They have created a generic IOT Dash button. Last year I wrote about how the Dash button was super specific to not only actions but also products, and they needed to make a generic programmable button.
Last year, the Dash button was first hacked to order pizza from Dominos. Later, people started hacking the button and using it as an IOT device to perform various tasks. This was the right direction for the button. Amazon realized the potential and has taken a step in the right direction The AWS IOT button is a generic device that can be programmed to do anything one wishes to accomplish. The price point ($20) seems steep for the device. The original Dash price point of $5 was perfect.
Amazon how has a IOT button (touch). The next step would be for Amazon to create MEMS sensors to sense sight, sound, pressure, acceleration, etc.. This will give developers all the needed sensor capability for IOT. Amazon could then expand their IOT ecosystem.
We all love products that are designed well. A well designed pair of shoes don't even seem to be there. A well designed corkscrew works exactly how you think it will work. A well designed user interface is intuitive and feels second nature.
Some designs are so bad that you immediately notice the flaw. Like a video camera lens that whines as you zoom in and out. Some are not so obvious. It is when the design misses the mark to deliver on the promise that you notice the flaw.
This is where good usecases come into picture. The set of usecases for a product should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE). If any usecase is missed, usability suffers and the customer fails to be delighted.
BMWs are well designed cars, inside and out. They are beautiful to look at; they are fun to drive; they are comfortable. There is a lot of room for improvement on the user interface on the inside, though. That is another blog post. Today, we are looking at the exterior body design.
As you can notice in the photo above, there is a lot of dust and dirt on the top of the rear bumper (arrow) whereas the entire car is clean and shiny. All the surfaces of the car are slanting downwards at some angle, whereas the bumper top is not. Because of this, dirt and rain water collect on top of the bumper rather than being washed away. Angling the bumper slightly down (0.5 - 1 deg) could have easily done the job. But, they missed it. Maybe, the designer thought that a flat bumper top would let the user keep things on it while opening the trunk or when the trunk is open. You can still do it with a slight angle.
This is an example of missing one of the key usecases. It is important to list out all possible usecases for a product and test for it. That is when you make a delightful product.
What is Lytro? I pondered a few years ago when Lytro came into existence. They had amazing technology albeit it was not very useful or competitive against the current still cameras. I wondered where Lytro would end up.
Yesterday, Lytro announced Immerge, its latest creation. With Immerge, Lytro seems to have found its sweet spot and saving grace.
Immerge is a professional grade cinematic virtual reality video camera. It offers 6 degrees of freedom which suits it very well for VR. It also allows one to mix CG into the footage. This is where Lytro's light field technology can truly shine. It can capture light volumes and play back based on where the viewer is looking. Imagine wearing a VR headgear and viewing a scene shot on Immerge. As you glance around using its 6 DoF, and as you look at objects, the scene could refocus based on the light field technology. It could simulate a human eye looking around in a scene bringing the scene eerily close to reality.
With Immerge, Lytro is also moving away from consumer market and into the professional market. Lytro is not just selling this camera, they are selling an end-to-end solution with a server, post-processing tools, a player as well as a streaming server. This will allow them to own and control the entire ecosystem. They have also mentioned support for all available and future VR headsets and players.
This is an amazing opportunity for Lytro to make a mark in the VR world as it matures.
Recently I was in Ireland and I visited the Blarney's castle. Here is an aerial view of the castle from a magazine ad.
Here is another picture I took from the ground.
Not very flattering, huh?
One of the reasons aerial photography (short range) is going to become popular is due to this discrepancy. It allows for one to be creative. It is not as simple as just whipping out your camera or phone and clicking a button. It is much more than that. It is commanding a small camera fitted on a drone and piloting it (or instructing it) to shoot pics from a different vantage point. It is exciting and the opportunities to be creative are boundless. I was cursing myself for not bringing my drone along.
That is when I saw this sign on the Blarney Castle grounds.
Bummer.
There are many reasons to ban drones from historical sites:
- Protect the monument or the historical artifact from being damaged by crashing aerial vehicles
- Protect the unobstructed visual beauty. This does not really hold ground, since people walking around the site are already obstructing the visual beauty
- Protect the monument from the trash of dead aerial cameras perched on inaccessible locations such as the ledge in the picture below (which I shot from the top of the tower and not a drone). We have all seen trash strewn on historical or natural monuments that is hard to clear
- Copyrighting the aerial view of the site. This may not hold much ground when photography in general is allowed
It looks like this is going to become the norm in all the tourist locations from now on. That is until the aerial cameras become smart enough to avoid obstructions and not get lost. There are several manufacturers already on this path. We will shortly start seeing aerial cameras that are capable of following a pre-set path, capable of avoiding stationary as well as moving objects, capable of returning home before losing complete control and being small enough to be carried by a photography enthusiast.
Amazon seems to be going away from its basic principles with the latest Amazon Dash button. Amazon has always been for empowering the customer, providing all the information (choice, prices, reviews, etc.) to the customer so that the customer has all the freedom to make intelligent decisions. But, with Amazon Dash, all this is going out of the window. Well, almost all.
Amazon Dash is a new service (and device) that Amazon has recently released. Amazon supplies stick-on buttons to Prime customers so they can stick these buttons to relevant things in their home/office to seamlessly order supplies before they run out. The following video from Amazon illustrates it.
The biggest gripe I have with this service is that it is too specific. It locks customers to specific brands.
With Dash buttons, Amazon has just driven all new comers out of the playing field. If Amazon ships me a Tide button, I am voluntarily signing up to buy Tide for the foreseeable future. Any new competitor to enter the field of washing soap will have a tough time to sell their wares. The principle of 'Choice to the customer' goes right out of the window. What if I wanted to try other brands? Do I have to go to Amazon and get another button for that?
Amazon is slowly entering our homes and introducing the concept of 'Internet of Things' (IOT) with this device. All this device is an IOT. albeit not a very smart one. A smart IOT would have figured out when I am getting low on my supplies and would have automatically placed an order for me. Well, we will have to wait a bit longer for that.
What Amazon should have done is create a generic button and sent a dozen of them to each Prime customer. The customer would then affix the buttons wherever appropriate (like fridge, washing machine, coffee machine, etc) and program them to a particular category. Note I am saying 'Category', not a specific product. So, the customer would affix a button on a washing machine and program it to the category of 'Laundry Detergent'. This is a one time activity. Once programmed, the device has a specific job. Its job is to order a laundry detergent.
This is where Amazon can still empower the customer. When the user presses the laundry button, the system automatically adds a few choice detergents into the shopping cart as options. User would then preview the options and choose the one that made the most sense based on brand, quality, reviews, price, etc. Of course, we could go further and mark one of the choices as a default choice for the next 6 months so that Amazon picks that choice automatically without prodding (at least for the next 6 months). This way Amazon can still provide the power of choice to the customer. The customer can always choose the same product and set it as default.
By not sending brand specific buttons, the customer is free to choose the brand she wants (at that point in time). Also, the buttons can be made re-programmable so that they can be moved around and assigned different categories as the user sees fit.
New devices and ideas should always be aligned to the corporate vision and should never waver from it. Otherwise, the company loses its vision and will soon become irrelevant.
Of course, with the present design, Amazon can flex its muscle and charge brands to position themselves on the Dash button. This is similar to the retail shelf space they compete for, in a brick and mortar store.
Amazon should use this opportunity to innovate and slowly position themselves within every home. As long as they stick to their original vision of empowering the customer, this will be a grand success.
