Mobile Internet report: some interesting insights

In this age of information overload, it is very easy to miss this comprehensive report by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley. It is a solid and very detailed work! Basically, the theme of the report is about the growth of mobile which will be much bigger than any of us can imagine.  This new technology cycle is compared with what Windows 3 did for the PC in 1990 and Netscape browser did for desktop internet in 1995. And how the mobile internet has potential to create/destroy more wealth than prior computing cycles!

The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes

The report is well supported by solid research and numbers to back the analysis and forecasts. It took me some time to go through it but it was worth it as it gave me some interesting insights. In general, if it comes to mobile, we don't need to read a report to predict the future - we just have to look around and see what/how everyone is using these smart devices. I will skip the obvious like the spark created by iphone, 100k+ apps etc. but there are still few interesting facts such as:

• 5 trends converging - 3G + social networking + video+ VOIP + impressive mobile devices
• 57 m iphone +163% growth, 125k developers worldwide, 2B+ downloads
• Many consumers are finding that their online usage rises dramatically when they have 24*7 mobile access to cloud based stuff
• Growth/monetization roadmap for mobile is provided by Japan
• Physical products are gaining share in mobile ecommerce - 20% in Japan but less than 1% in US
• China leads world in virtual good monetization
• Google (Android) has the best chance to to serve as a more open counter-balance to apple. Opera leading transformation of mobile browsers
• Professional content repository is still open - amazon, iphone, netflix, hulu?
• Open mobile web potentially more attractive to developers - Apple may believe its platform management is prudent way to ensure high quality content but it also runs the risk of stifling development and innovation
• Clouds will be providing real infrastructure for mobile applications
• Location aware ads will be better targetted
• People are more willing to pay for content on mobile than desktop
• AT&T - 50* mobile traffic growth in last three years despite only 40% subscriber growth over the same period
• Shift in type of applications from games, lifestyle, utilities, enterptainment etc. to business oriented though among the top 100 applications on iphone, business oriented applications are just five
• Daily usage for productivity based applications is probably less than 5-6 %

I wish there was little more information about the user profile but I still consider it the best work by Mary Meeker after her famous Internet report in 1994. Since new business models are often created during technology changes so there is an opportunity for eveyone inlcuding Semantic Technology to take advantage of this booming market because:

•  Browser still remains the weakest link in these devices. There is no integrated/personalized experience.
• The principles of end user interaction have not been established
• Semantic search will become more relevant as users will have less tolerance for too many results.
• Semantic and location specific advertising will have a role to play
• Cloud computing will be one of the biggest enabler of writing semantic applications for mobile devices as computing power will no longer be an issue for even smaller shops
• Semantic web powered commerce can also be triggered
• Agent technology should find better business cases

Obviously, any analyst report will not be specific about the type of future applications/services which will reside in these mobile devices. That job is for innovators to figure out!

Online retail : How Best Buy is using Semantic Technology to define a new trend

This downturn has changed the behavior of consumers considerably in the retail sector. Though, the retail industry, just in US, has been more than four trillion dollars in last few years but it has been affected by this economy in last two years. Despite of this trend, 80% of retailers feel that the online retail channel continues to be better suited to withstand an economic slowdown better than other channels. It is validated by recent observations in the retail sector:

• Black Friday spending rose 0.5%, ($54 million), to $10.7 billion, this year from last year.
• Online sales have been up 17% (Thurs. to Sun.) over the same period last year.
• Cyber Monday has been up 11%, more than they did a year ago
• Online retail has been growing more than 20-25% in countries like Germany, Italy, UK
• Forrester Research projects that online retail sales will increase by 8 percent to $44.7 billion this holiday season

The channel is slowly maturing and with many of the easy wins now maximised, further progress will be much slower. In industries where consumer shifts as small as 1 percent can severely dent the profitability of brand, retailers now need to think more strategically about maximising revenue online. Textbook theory tells you that changes in the relationship between how much consumers are willing to pay, on the one hand, and their perception of the value they are receiving, on the other, underpins behavioral changes. There is also a strong trend where consumere are learning to live without expensive products and they are no longer willing to pay easily for premium brands. According to this article, the retailers need to be aware of following key trends:

• As acquiring new customers becomes more of a challenge, retailers should switch more marketing budget to maintaining existing customers and driving repeat business
• They must clearly communicate why customers should shop with them, and what extra benefits can be gained from doing so
• Providing clear, accurate and detailed information on products, prices and additional charges is a key
• Deep knowledge of your competitors’ online offerings coupled with sophisticated testing of different customer acquisition strategies will be crucial to stay ahead of the market

Till now, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, has been a successful strategy applied by online retailers to increase the traffic to their website but it has its own limitations - the links to the website doesn't communicate clearly why customers should shop with them and also doesn't provide clear information accurate and detailed information on products, prices and many other relevant things. GoodRelations ontology, which is just an year old, can fulfill those gaps and give retailers that extra advantage. It is a standardized vocabulary for product, price, and company data that can (1) be embedded into existing static and dynamic Web pages and that (2) can be processed by other computers. This increases the visibility of your products and services in the latest generation of search engines. I have explained some of the concepts of microformats and RDFa in one of my previous blogs but I will highly recommend you to visit website maintained by Martin Hepp, the creator of Good Relations Ontology. Martin has done a great job in coming up with a practical application of Semantic Technology which can deliver value. The best part is that adaption will eventually increase as the learning curve is so simple.

In his talk at the Search Engine Strategies 2009 conference in Chicago, Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer for Best Buy, Co., Inc., reported very surprising effects of adding GoodRelations and RDFa to their products pages:

1. GoodRelations + RDFa improved the rank of the respective pages in Google tremendously. In fact, if you try the query "BestBuy Ferris Bueller" on Google, then the page  comes on rank # 1 ahead of the much more established page . This indicates a strong effect of GoodRelations + RDFa on Google's appreciation of a page. It is particularly surprising since the age of a domain has now a huge influence on ranking in Google - older ones get a much higher ranking. In this case, the semantically augmented one is just eight weeks old but it is still ranked higher!

2. Jay also reported a 30 % percent (!) increase in traffic on the BestBuy stores pages, e.g. http://stores.bestbuy.com/1895

3. Yahoo observes a 15% increase in the Click-through-Rate (CTR). Nick Cox from Yahoo also recently reported that augmented search results, e.g. those with GoodRelations / RDFa in Yahoo get a 15 % higher Click-through-Rate (CTR).

So in short: While better visibility in traditional search engines is of course not the main intended effect by adding GoodRelations & RDFa rich mark-up, I think these findings are so substantial that any SEO / SEM consultant should apply it - now!

 

Kudos to Best Buy for showing leadership in early adaption of this technology! I don't know whether it is a tipping point or not but I do recognize that it is a very positive step in adaption of semantic technology by the retail industry! In the end, the most important thing is to give SEO experts and those who pay them an incentive to add rich meta-data now. I hope to see many other online retailers to join the bandwagon and take full advantage of this simple technology.

Microsoft Semantic Engine!

One of the highlights of the PDC09, an event focused on the technical strategy of the Microsoft developer platform, was the overview and demonstration of the Microsoft Semantic Engine. The Semantic Engine unifies search, structured querying, and analytics over structured and unstructured data.You can read some more details about PDC at the CTO's blog. It goes beyond existing components like Lucene by supporting both text and non-text, such as audio, video, and images. The key points are:

• Micorsoft has been working and investing heavily on this technology for the last two years
• The "Microsoft Semantic Engine" name is just a place holder
• It is not a W3C SemanticWeb(tm) approach but one which melds the unique capabilities of unsupervised machine learning (hierarchical clustering), information retrieval models (higher-dimensional vector spaces), pluggable and trainable classifiers (SVMs, Naive Bayesian, Maximum Entropy, Decision Tree, etc.), and personalized filtering and ranking.
• One of the goals is to make search semantically enhanced. Clustering the results based on Semantics is a key differentiator.
• You can expect to see the Microsoft Semantic Engine in one of the upcoming SQL Server Betas.

This demo/presentation will explain the approach in more detail. My initial thoughts are:

• This is a good move by Microsoft and was long overdue because there is a solid business case for integrating this technology in the enterprise.
• I view it more as a flavor of text extraction/analytics technology - infact, Msft has said it very clearly that it is not using the semantic web technology approach
• Having Microsoft in the Semantic technology space is a good thing for the Semantic Technology indutsry. This is a great validation from one of the most successful leaders in the software space
• They are not the only one who is trying this approach. As far as I understand, the goal behind Inxight's acquisition by Business Objects (now SAP) was the same one. I am not aware exactly how that integration has worked out
• I am sure Micosroft will come out with a clear message regarding the "Semantic Engine's" positioning in the enterprise in comparison to Fast Search Engine (Now part of Sharepoint division).
• It will intersting to understand if Powerset (now Bing) technology, Microsoft's semantic search, was used in this effort
• More details are needed to understand how it will work with disparate data sources
• Microsoft has been underestimated for too long as far as their search strategy is concerned. I agree that Google has a big lead in terms of number of users on the web but I really think that they have made all the right moves, both for web as well as enterprises,at least  in last 2-3 years as far as search space is concerned. There are three great moves:
• Acquistion of Fast search and integrating it with Sharepoint (MOSS)
• Acquistion of Powerset and launch of Bing
• Plan to introduce Semantic Engine and integrating it with SQL serve 
• Probably,  services and product-based companies in the Semantic space, need to go back and revise their marketing message.
• In the end, it just validates my initial thoughts that Semantic technology is a superset of Semantic Web Technology. Microsoft's approach or Semantic Web technology (W3C) approach are two different approaches to solve Semantic related problems in the enterprise. This is the reason, I named my blog as Semantic Technology blog.

Semantic Technology and iPhone!

Recently, I came across this intersting article about "Inside the Apple Economy"  - http://bit.ly/2FnBPt . Please read about some of the unknown names who have made a killing in last two years just by exploting this new ecosystem. I believe that Semantic web, linked data and Semantic technologies in general for the enteprise will also be creating an ecosystem which will be exploited by many people. But I only realized this Thanksgiving weekend during a NY city visit along with few friends of mine that there can be a corelation between iphone and Semantic Technology.

We had not made any dinner reservations as we were not sure about timings and were confident of finding an interesting cusine in the NY city, practically a paradise for your palate, which would work for everyone in the group. I was also counting on my Zagat membership which I have always found to be a very trusted source for restaurant reviews. We soon realized that everytime we agreed on a particular cuisine and restaurant after looking up ratings on Zagat on my iphone, the restuarant was always few miles away and it was very difficult to find two cabs on a crowded weekend. So we decided to use "Around Me" - an interesting application on iphone which can list critical services around you — banks, coffee shops, bars, gas stations, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants and so on. Using geolocation, the app orders each service by its proximity to you — how many yards away — and, like other apps aimed at the traveler, maps out a route from here to there, if requested.

We kept looking up restaurants in "around me" but we couldn't find ratings and reviews for those restaurants. So I ended up toggling between these two applications, during our long walk, for a while till everybody agreed on a Turkish cusine.

I was wondering if these two services shared there data using Semantic Technology, basically Linked data, then life would have been so simple. All I had to do was to ask - "Give me all restaurants with minimum 4 star rating within 400 yards of my position." Hopefully, some food for thought for enterpreneurs who want to exploit the iphone economy. As somebody rightly said, "The food that enters the mind must be watched as closely as the food that enters the body."