Reality Mining

A New York based company called Sense Networks recently launched two new services.  One is an platform called Macrosense that (anonymously) tracks where people move around via their GPS or GPS enabled phones, WiFi, triangulation, etc.  The the other is a mobile application called Citysense that enables people who opt-in to being tracked to access data about what’s “cool” based on where people are going – and how often.

While the latter application falls squarely within the newly-hot geotagging movement and the now-maturing social networking spaces, it exists mostly to entice people to opt-in to the service – if you allow Sense Networks access to your data, you get access to Citysense.  This model apparently works better than paying people outright for their data.

However, we think the data mining platform is more intriguing.  The company lists many interesting applications for it such as identifying “influence points” along popular routes or qualifying demand (and the elasticity of demand) for places, activities and services by income level.  The platform might also be useful in qualifying respondents for consumer insights work.  Instead of self-reporting, one could use this system to create a recruitment center based on people opting-in to allow you access to their movement data so you would know for certain the potential respondents had actually been to Acme Retail Store before recruiting them for an IDI or focus group.

Sense Networks insists they aggregate the data anonymously (and one of its founders now consults for them exclusively on privacy issues).  Still, at some point in the process, the system must collect unique data such as income, gender or age before it scrubs and aggregates this data.  As we have mentioned before, we think that the advantages of persistent identify and the ubiquity of surveillance will continue to trump privacy issues.  Still, opting-in to a system that tracks your every movement would seem to be a hard sell.  It will be interesting to see how consumers respond to Sense Network’s inducements.  If consumers derive enough value from trading on their geodata, you can be sure the big Telcos will follow Sense Network’s lead.

Filed under: Networks, Science , geodata, Networks, qualitative research, reality mining

Social Networking Burnout

Recently, I tried to use Plaxo’s contact tagging and organization system to sort out all my business contacts – a kind of One Network to Rule them All. I had contacts in LinkedIn, Gmail (two accounts), my business POP mail, several Excel spreadsheets, Facebook and a couple of blogging accounts, as well as contacts in OS X’s Mail and Address Book apps. Oh, and a stack of business cards going back two months. As you can imagine, this was one of the less successful exercises I’ve undertaken. More interestingly, I discovered that this is not a technical failing on the part of networking programs.

The problem is people are starting to get burnt out on social networking. More precisely, people are getting tired of having to maintain their identity on multiple networking sites. There are some moves to address this problem from companies and organizations like Twitter and OpenID, but by and large you still have to update each site if you change jobs or cell phone numbers.

Just this morning, I received an invitation to the social reputation site Naymz, which I duly added to my roster. What if Naymz is the next LinkedIn? I wouldn’t want to miss that. Then Naymz asked me, as a lot of these systems do, if it could take a peek into my LinkedIn and Gmail accounts (et al.) to see if I had contacts there using Naymz and, oh, by the way, wouldn’t I like to invite some of these people to use Naymz?

Well, no. When I was trying to update my Plaxo account, several of my contacts sent me polite emails telling me that they are sticking to one network (usually LinkedIn but in one case Facebook). One of my acquaintances put it succinctly:

“I’m a LinkedIn man right now… sell me on the merits of spinning up another connection platform to maintain.”

Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet put it in even more dire terms:

“Social networks as they are conceived today are cul-de-sacs where our personal data goes to die, returning minimal value before it becomes the property of a company or part of the public record.”

So, what does the future hold? Will social networking sites consolidate, become more homogenized, and basically offer users a “Coke vs. Pepsi” choice? Or will the number of sites continue to proliferate – and we’ll yearn for the days when we “only” belonged to seven social networking sites? As we go down the path of consolidation or fragmentation, the challenge for market researchers and strategists is to understand who’s using which network for what and, more importantly, how to extract information and value from those networks – delicately.

ADDENDUM 07/03/08:  OK, so now I’m doubting myself – David Hasselhoff has launched his own social networking site; maybe the end is indeed neigh

Filed under: Information, Networks , identity, social networking

Automated Emotion Recognition

Ray Kurzweil’s always fascinating blog has an interesting post about a University of Toronto group who has developed an audio/visual system that can recognize several basic emotional states of computer users regardless of what language they speak with a high degree of accuracy. Emotional recognition technology is in its infancy, but could be a fantastic aid to site optimization or focus group analysis in the future.

Filed under: Science , Innovation, Science

The Future of Competitive Intelligence Networking

At a conference not too long ago, we had dinner with a group of traditional market researchers. We were sitting around the table and the talk turned to the future of market research and how our field will change over the next five years. Our perspective was that the biggest change will be in how we do primary research on competitive intelligence engagements.

Right now, competitive intelligence practitioners use a combination of secondary research and personal networking to identify people to talk to. It is often a time-consuming process, and there is no way around it.  Compounding the problem is the fact that when you phone people you do not know well, you are assuming (or just hoping) they have the insight that you need and that they are willing and able to share it. It is a clumsy process, but an irreplaceable one if you want to do competitive intelligence properly.

However, we think the process is going to get a lot more streamlined in the near future.  Social networking sites are the first evolution. It is much easier to find people now that LinkedIn and Facebook are mainstream.  Still, the system is not perfect - mainly because finding the right people remains time intensive - even for those practitioners adept at mining social networking systems.  So what might a more automated process look like?

A good example is the NNDB Network Mapper.  The NNDB Network Mapper contains relationship data for over 32,000 individuals and organizations and allows you to view their connections with a high degree of granularity.  We think businesses will increasingly roll out or adapt visual tools like NNDB for their internal knowledge management efforts.

So, in terms of competitive intelligence, imagine the world five years from now.  Tools to see into most of the world’s social networking sites, professional organizations, and corporate or governmental sites are now commonplace.  Instead of having to make 20 calls to find the one sales engineer who is not under NDA and has worked on both your and your competitor’s software, you simply plug in the parameters into a search engine and *poof* there she is!  Not only that, you have a good idea who might be able to put you in direct touch with her.  In fact, you might be able just to type in your Key Intelligence Topics and watch as a list of 20 people who have the information you want appears.

The challenge is how to do this while maintaining privacy, but people – especially those in the “Gen Y” group - increasingly see more value in being connected and known, so privacy concerns of the past may wind up being non-issues.

Filed under: Competitive Intelligence, Information, Networks , Competitive Intelligence, Networking, Primary

Correcting the Personal Data Imbalance

Google launched Google Health today, and we think this is another significant datapoint in an interesting trend.  Essentially, Google Health lets you import your health records (both by populating a database and by scanning extant records) then allows you to manipulate your data to research conditions or hospitals as well as track drug interactions and dosing regimens.  The potental value is huge - individuals could control the content and portability of their own medical records.  This service isn’t exactly groundbreaking; Intel, Microsoft, GE Health, have their own Patient Health Record (PHR) systems, and a host of other firms like CapMed, Medkey and WebMD have similar systems.  What makes this different is that Google is doing it.

However you feel about Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, people already trust Google with heaps of their personal data, and most people understand that Google retains and repurposes their personal data.  People trust Google in a way they do not trust other companies.  Perhaps this is because Google seems genuinely interested in offering services, mostly for free, that actually make people’s lives easier.  It is at this intersection between trust and functionality where things get interesting, and where we see a trend in consumer behavior that could affect how market researchers do their job.

Although consumers seemed inured to ubiquitous data collection, medical records light up a  emotional warning beacon brighter than other types of personal data.  So, if Google Health succeeds, it will further demonstrate consumers’ increasing desire to control their personal data in order to get something back from corporations hungry for that data.  There is a serious imbalance between what companies know about consumers versus how consumers can leverage their own data to their own benefit.  The imbalance is caused by the cost associated with collecting the vast amounts of data companies need to make business decisions.  If consumers could offer companies that data themselves, on an ad hoc basis, would companies still need to pay giant aggregators for that data?  The need to interpret the data will never disappear, but how companies acquire that data and the value they have to offer in exchange for it may change.

Filed under: Information , Consumer, Health, Science

New Advance in Sensory Research to Chew On

Scientists have developed an artificial mouth to replicate both how chewing and saliva work, potentially giving researchers a better baseline from which to make qualitative taste assessments.

Another  breakthrough as interesting as much for its capabilities as for the technology it uses, is the system developed by Oxford University to measure the heat in chili peppers using carbon nanotubes.

Although geared towards speech rather than sensory research, another cool device allows scientists for the first time to directly record how the tongue interacts with the teeth to form sound using a special set of full dentures.

It is funny to think how little direct, physical data we have on the mechanics of speaking and eating.

Filed under: Science , Gadgets, Innovation, Science

Patent Chaos

You would think one thing you can count on in our information economy would be that, once you have obtained a patent and fended off challengers, your IP would be legally protected. That is until a legal scholar points out that two thirds of patent appeals judges appointed since 2000 were appointed in an unconstitutional way…and then the Justice Department basically says, “Oops. Our bad.”

Here’s what happened. In 1999 Congress passed legislation (the “Intellectual Property and Communications Reform Act of 1999,”) that changed the way patent appeals judges were appointed. Then in late 2007, the aforementioned legal scholar, John F. Duffy, published a paper showing that this method of appointment appears to be unconstitutional. It is likely that most patent appeals since 2000 had at least one judge appointed under the new system.

No one is entirely certain what will happen now. On the face of it it appears that any patent appeal heard after 2000 could be challenged. In April Translogic asked the Supreme Court to rule on a case that would be the first legal challenge based on Duffy’s analysis. Until then (and perhaps even after that as the Translogic case may be too narrow to set precedent), everything is up in the air.

When the news first broke, we asked a friend of ours who routinely works with patents at a large, well known technology company if he thought this was a big deal, to which he replied, “Sounds like a huge potential impact.” Still, we can not imagine that it is in anyone’s interest to let what was, essentially, an honest mistake about an esoteric issue invalidate billions of dollars worth of patents. No one is claiming that the patent appeals judges were incompetent, just that the appointment process was not correct. We would hope the Justice Department would get a legislative solution to Congress to fix this in the near future. That said, we are wondering if this issue will become conflated with the perennial bugbear of patent reform.

Filed under: Legal , IP, Legal, Regulatory

You Are What You Don’t Buy

Great summary of consumer identity research at one of our favorite blogs, Mind Hacks.  The gist of it is: recent research shows consumers take as much care to avoid products that represent lifestyles with which they don’t want to be associated as they do with products they feel represent who they are.

Filed under: Marketing , Consumer, Lifestyle