What is “Futuristic” anyways?
Last week I twittered my thoughts on Amazon’s futuristic Kindle product. I got a response from an old friend of mine wondering why I thought it was futuristic as eBooks and ePaper was invented quite a few years ago. His response made me realize that people often have a different opinion on what futuristic is. So I am dedicating this blog post to share my views and opinions about futuristic.
Let’s get straight to the point. Futurism or futuristic has, in my opinion, nothing to do with a product itself. Instead it is all about a future where a product or a technology has a vital role. Implementing such a technology requires a controlled expansion of our social, cultural, and/or business framework that will lead to a mature and sustainable marketplace for the “futuristic” technology or product.
Building a technology doesn’t move it out of the futuristic category. eBooks has been around for a long time. In fact my senior project in college in 1996 was an eBook that connected to a computer that held a digital library. I have even bought eBooks online and read them on my Nokia 3250 beginning of this decade. However, I’m a geek and love new toys. I’ve read more eBooks than I have read real books.
In the real world, however, geeks like myself only account for a tiny fraction of the population. Not enough to create and sustain a major marketplace. What Amazon and other players in the eBook/ePaper industry need to accomplish is to make such a technology socially acceptable, integrate it into our culture, and create acceptance in the business world. Only then will eBooks become an everyday technology and I will be able to stop calling it futuristic.
PS. As a side note I wanted to mention a few other futuristic technologies/services/products
- Flying cars – Invented but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
- Space tourism – Happened but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
- Mobile Payment – Exists but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
- Smart Homes – Exists but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
Rapid Futurism: Changing the world by design
After years of research on human vs business vs technology relationship one fact stands out; very rarely do I come across a futuristic vision that can’t be implemented on a smaller scale today. Too often do I meet “futurists” or “visionaries” with great visions of the future but with an attitude that we (mankind) are not ready for their vision, mostly because it is too futuristic.
Creating the technologies that is going to drive the marketplaces of tomorrow can be done by design even for a pre-funded startup. Sure, resources, like funds and skilled staff, will get you to the future faster. Yet, it is the small startups that have the ideas of tomorrow, though they lack the fundamental understanding of the relationship between humans, society, culture, and technology to be able to realize the technologies of tomorrow.
Rapid Futurism goes beyond technology.Rapid Futurism is the theory on how to envision, design, build, position, introduce, market, and grow your futuristic technology to achieve highest chance of success.
Creating the technologies of tomorrow requires leadership. I often like to think about it as two planets; present day Earth and tomorrow’s Earth. You’re job is to build a bridge between the two worlds and lead the market across your bridge. The catch: There’s hundreds of competing bridges. So leadership is a must.
Your first thought might be to pour resources and money into marketing. Marketing, however, is a brute force attack on the market with no guarantee of success. Rapid Futurism instead focuses on how to position your technology in the present day market with minimal, but strategic, marketing and help you move the market towards your tomorrow.
I will release a whitepaper within 30-45 days that lays out the details of Rapid Futurism. Unfortunately this blog post would get too long.
The Future Is About Finding the Seeds, Not Watering the Plants
A wise man told me a few months ago that his rule of thumb is that over 99% of the activity in the wireless world is feeding existing consumer demand while less than 1% is unveiling unknown (assumed by the developer) consumer demand (I will assume this rule of thumb can be applied to any industry). The true futurists are within this 1% bucket.
A futurist looks beyond the hot markets of today. I like to compare it to a garden of flowers. While 99% of the people are watering the flowers that have grown and hence are visible to them, the futurists are the people working on finding the seeds that have yet to grow.
Let’s be realistic: Few futurists will succeed in seeing their technologies becoming big. The challenges a futurist will face between idea and gaining market acceptance are enormous. Though I will argue that the biggest challenge is not the technology, marketing, or the business side, instead it is the early feedback the futurist gets from opinion makers, friends, and team members (assuming the futurist has a team that is going to realize the vision).
What futurists have to be not just good at, but excellent at is judging people’s opinions. I had Walt Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg slaughter my mobile payment technology in front of hundreds of people back in 2006. Yet, just an hour before a representative from Vodafone had come up to me and said our technology was some of the best he had seen in the mobile payment sector.
In many cases Mossberg’s comments would have discouraged the futurist from continuing forward. So who do you listen to? After all, Mossberg is quite the opinion maker in popular media. But if you think about it, the Vodafone representative earns his paycheck by researching emerging mobile payment technologies. Mossberg would have a hard time selling newspapers if he wrote about tomorrow’s technologies that his reader couldn’t easily wrap their head around. A futurist has to be good at knowing who to share their vision with at what time.
Even more damaging is building a team with non-futuristic people. A team tasked at realizing a futuristic technology needs to be comfortable with building a technology that won’t be popular within the month. This is a hurdle I just recently experienced at GoLife Mobile when a person in our executive management team in a meeting advocated for abandoning the vision because she couldn’t see evidence that consumer’s wanted this. Even though we had “shopped” the vision around leading wireless experts and analysts with phenomenal feedback, this person argued that opinions didn’t matter, hard evidence do.
Although in 99% of startups that might well be a good rule of thumb, a startup (or established company) building futuristic technology can’t ask themselves what the market wants today. The question is “How will the market look tomorrow?” A successful futurist will understand that evidence is at best weak in the early stages and instead use the right people’s opinions to evaluate their own gut feeling.
Is Hype The Right Strategy?
In the recent months I have advised more startups wanting to develop mobile apps than I have in any other month in the past. That in itself is as expected. However, the surprising part of these gigs is the lack of common business understanding. Most of these startups have great ideas that they want to realize on the iPhone platform.
The number one rule in startup business (actually, any business regardless of size) is to build a product for the right audience. Many “serious” (and by serious I mean people with GREAT ideas and BIG dreams) iPhone developers tend to follow a different rule “build a product for my ideal audience”. While the iPhone platform is a great platform, it is not the platform for all products.
About a month ago I consulted for a Florida based startup who wanted to build an office-like package for the iPhone. Their dream was to become the leading high-end supplier of mobile office package for the corporate world. My first question to the founders were “Why the iPhone?”. The response was something along the line with “It is the fastest growing smartphone device. Almost everyone has one.”.
While the iPhone has seen an unprecedented growth among consumers in the United States, it has not been able to establish itself in the global business sector nor in the European consumer sector. A business application would most likely do better in Blackberry and/or Windows here in the United States & Canada, and Windows and/or Symbian for the rest of the world.
This startup story is a typical example of founders falling for the hype. Quite often founders forget to separate product from hardware. In the above example the office package was a neat package which I personally believe would do well. But to do well you need people willing to purchase your product. When the price tag is ~$100 your success is a direct result of your ability to target the right audience (read develop for the device your audience is using).
Now hype isn’t just a bad thing. A few people have a great ability to use hype to accelerate their sales. For example, the above startup could have used an iPhone version to gain exposure for their product. This exposure could help them accelerate sales on other devices (for example Blackberry).
This lack of common business practice isn’t just a bad thing. I’m noticing a growing trend among business savvy developers. More and more people are taking low selling ideas from app stores and creating similar apps for competing platforms. In essence, an app idea that is created for the wrong device and struggles gaining popularity are taken and re-created for a different device where there are users more open to purchasing the app.
Moving to WordPress
I’m finally back on blogging and am moving to WordPress. Keep checking in for my thoughts, opinions, and advice on how to best shape the future with technology.
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