You've heard about the Samsung and LG seemingly paper thin 3D OLEDs (let me tell you they are amazing and the wall of 50+ LG 3D screens at the entry of the booth was mind boggling), but there were other small finds at CES that you may not have heard of so I will share them here.
The Intel keynote with CEO Paul Otellini showed us what the power of chips can do beyond the gorgeous ultrabooks that proliferated the show floor. Here we see the Adidas store footwear wall that was showcased in the London flagship Originals store and resulted in a 5% uptick in new product sales in two weeks.
Then we move to the futuristic with the Aerial 3D Display made by Burton - these
are laser lights that truly create Star Wars like 3D holograms in regular air (in other words they do not need to have another particles in the air like mist in order to be seen as most laser displays require). The laser lights can be interactive. Apparently, you can make the lasers interactive with the Kinect, and probably any other interactive device like a tablet or smartphone. The can go as high as 5M in the air and 3M wide. They can be multi-colored as long as they do only one color at a time.
This is the Printing Dress which was featured at the Microsoft booth. Made almost entirely out of paper, it allows you to tweet and display the text as art on the skirt. While clearly a prototype - if you pear closely under the hem of the dress you can see the massive keyboard which is not condusive to elegantly moving through a crowd - the barrier between thought to public communication has lost one more brick.
Robitics in small sizes had a presence at CES as shown by Cubelets produced by Modular Robotics. These are plastic building blocks that have sensors built inside and when you combine them, you can get the combinations to have different capabilities. Matt, who works for Cublelets, gives us a great demonstration. The Cubelets are available for direct purchase at the Modular Robotics website.
As you may have guessed, mobile devices are becoming the interface to our lives - they will (and in some cases already do) control our HVAC home systems, or TVs and radio systems, our car settings and garage door system, etc. etc. Shelby.TV enables your iPhone to become your social media interactive video remote control. Whew! That was a lot of things together. What they do is they gather your Twitter and Facebook feeds and see what your friends are recommending you to watch. They then pick up the links, and post the friend comment with the video so you know why it is showing up on your Shelby.TV. While you are watching, you can also comment and it will go back out to your social net. And all this interaction between you and the TV is done through your iPhone or tablet. The app is free on iTunes.
Another interactive I liked which was shown at the Verizon booth is the DNA Wall by Downstream which uses a mind mapping tool to display marketing information in a very dynamic way. If you check out The Brain, you will see it is exactly the same. I have used The Brain for a variety of projects for mind mapping a solution structure out, but also have used it for presentations. A great way to keep the visual dynamic and the content visually structured.
And to drive out out of this blog into the next, we have Romotive's little Romo's which is a smartphone based toy vehicle in which one smartphone resides, and then another smartphone can control it. It works with iOS and Android phones. Very cute, very fun and just $99 if you want to give it a go.
More CES highlights to come...




Verizon Knawing Off Hand That Feeds It With 3 Cent MT Fee Increase
by Limor Schafman
Those of us in the marketing, branding, mobile, content business are delighted that text messaging is outpacing voice in usage numbers. But wait! It seems a company wants to bank on this at a time when "banking" is getting a bad name. Verizon has decided to increase its MT transaction fees by 3 cents per transaction for all content owners.
Bottom line on what this means: "It will kill most people's business - this will have huge imact!", says Terry Hsiao of HookMobile, an MMS aggregator.
Why this dramatic statement? There are two levels of SMS/MMS messages - one is MO or "mobile originated" message which is when you or I, consumers, send messages out from our mobile phones. We pay for these through our text messaging plans or per message. MT or "mobile termination" messages are those that come from content owners. These are paid for by the content owner. The rates they pay depend on the aggregator they work with and the fees those aggregators charge, often sliding scale per volume of messages.
Verizon is suggesting that as of November 1, each single MT message will cost at least 3 cents, on top of the usual charges they and the aggregators charge. The bottom line cost impact is enormous both on content owners and the mobile marketing ecosystem as a whole. Some of the companies which will be affected:
- Advertiser or brand companies that use SMS/MMS to targets and communicate its offerings: Coca Cola, Target, Ikea, etc.
- Banks doing mobile reminders or other customer contact transactions
- Political campaigns pushing messages out to constituents
- News, sports, horoscope and other similar types of content owners [note: these are some of the most successful uses of text messaging]
- Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter
Fundamentally, any company trying to build brand connectivity, invite transactions or provide customer service to their consumers will be penalized by this rate increase.
What are some of the market implications:
- Mobile marketing as we know it will shift. SMS is currently the most advanced form of mobile marketing - it may diminish significantly as a medium, disappear, or used only when customers will perceive a real value in the message being delivered to them [ie a bill payment alert].
The mobile marketing landscape may change as a result with other forms such as WAP or client based applications taking a lead. There are significant negatives to both these forms that do not compare with SMS for certain functionality so they do not fully fill the void of diminished SMS messages.
- Content owners will push the price increase to consumers. Consumers may agree to this if they see value, as written above, but otherwise, consumers will be forced to pay more for text and the question is, will they want to do this? And for receiving advertising messages?
- Content owners will diminish the amount of mobile marketing they do.
- Content owners which have smaller revenue potential will go out of business [ring tone companies].
- Advertising companies focusing on helping companies do mobile marketing will see a significant decrease in campaigns and revenue.
- Consumers may ultimately not receive the services and content they now expect.
Rumor has it that AT&T is considering raising MT message costs by 1 cent. Has the cost of delivering MT increased. I think not. This move to increase fees is a taking an overreaching advantage of a market phenomenon of exponential increase in text messaging and of a just budding mobile advertising marketplace to - effectively - kill it off.
Maybe it is Verizon's gambit to create such an outcry that when they lower the MT fee increase to 1 cent or half a cent, the content owners will be grateful and buy into it more readily.
Whatever the reason, Verizon, is gnawing, ripping into, and stripping the hands that are feeding its network and hurting the companies attached to those hands as well. The market will respond - and I hope it will use its power - particularly that possessed by the large content owners [banks and brands] - to tell Verizon "No!" in no uncertain terms.
If your company is in this ecosystem, speak out loud and strong.
p.s. - if Verizon pursues this increase - this will be a huge opportunity for other carriers who do not do an increase to grab significant marketing and advertising dollars, content dollars and new consumers.
October 10, 2008 in Market Commentary, Marketing, Mobile | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)