This created a situation where most early adopters, thought leaders, and people in the IT-industry itself loathed Microsoft, their inferior technology and their simple solutions for the mass market. However, the mainstream market ignored the warnings from the IT elite and gladly adopted Microsoft’s proprietary solutions which they were spoon fed by the distribution channels.

Now history is repeating itself, with Facebook in the same role as Microsoft. The massive privacy invasions carried out by Facebook are every bit as evil as Microsoft’s dirty tricks. The tech community, civil rights activists and privacy advocates are highly critical. There are signs of a backlash. Many people are uneasy and upset about the changes to Facebook and the insidious invasion of their privacy. As they begin to understand the extent to which their privacy is being infringed upon, users are choosing to make their Facebook accounts more and more impersonal. Some are even using aliases instead of their real names in an attempt to protect their privacy.

There is no user value in giving up your privacy. Users don’t ask to have their personal data made transparent. If they want their information to be public they can change their privacy settings. Most choose not to. But there is huge value for Facebook to push or trick users into accepting that their personal data is a commodity owned by Facebook. The language in the Facebook account settings and help pages is deceptive and often confusing. The slick rhetoric and complicated settings are all part of Facebook’s goal: to get you to give up as much of your privacy as possible – sometimes without even informing you.

However, just like the Microsoft case in the 90s, I think the majority of people will continue to use Facebook anyway. Most users seem not to care or do not understand when Facebook makes stealth changes in the user privacy settings from opt-in to opt-out or exposes their user data to external partners.

Users may dislike Facebook’s bullying but it is probably the smartest strategy for the company. User data is a gold mine for Facebook and it will probably provide advertisers on third party websites with even better customer data than what Google can offer.

The old controversy about Microsoft will most likely be dwarfed by future Facebook controversies. Facebook seems destined to engulf the open internet. Their intent seems to be to collect the user data and social graph for the richest billion people on the planet in order to eliminate their privacy. They are well on their way to achieving this goal and considering how many users are addicted to Facebook, Zuckerberg seems unstoppable.

The customer representatives at Three are required to handle 9.5 support calls per hour and each support call should not be longer than four minutes. 80 percent of all support calls are supposed to be handled during the first contact and calling back to the customer is discouraged. Failure to comply with these quantitative targets results in a reduction of the ten percent variable salary. The staff is not allowed to pass an angry customer on to a manager and they are not allowed to credit more than 600 Swedish kronor (€60) to the customer’s account.

To manage the system, the staff has developed coping methods. For example: They tell the customer that they will call back, but don’t. If the customer’s connection doesn’t work they tell them to turn their broadband off for 30 minutes and try again later so that they can make the support call as short as possible and dump the problem onto someone else. Instead of manually entering information about the customer case in the system they just tick the box for invoice issues, which means the customer has to explain everything again the next time he or she calls. They tell the customer that he/she has been credited 600 Swedish kronor, but the truth is that they have only sent the case to a manager for approval.

One result of this is a record high 15,469 formal complaints filed with the public municipal consumer protection offices around the country.  A  horror story mentioned in the article is about a customer whose IP telephony service stopped working because she never got the information that the application had to be reinstalled when the service provider was acquired by a larger company. She didn’t want to lose her phone number and continued to pay the monthly fee. After five months of complaints she demanded to be compensated for the extra costs of using her mobile but her request to speak with a manager was denied.

She eventually managed to find the phone number to the managing director and called him with her complaint. The company offered to cancel the subscription before the fixed term contract expired and gave her 500 Swedish kronor (€50) in compensation but The Swedish National Board for Consumer Complaints ruled that she should also be refunded for her monthly fee during the period that her phone subscription didn’t work.

Unfortunately, I have experienced similar problems. Two years ago my broadband connection started to disconnect between 10 to 50 times/day. I called customer support at least twenty times over a nine week period and spent hours speaking with their customer representatives.

After around five calls I got the first clue to solving the problem when I was connected to one of their more experienced technicians, who said that my old ADSL modem from 2002 couldn’t handle the new faster download speeds. I bought a new ADSL modem, but had the same problem. I made a few calls to product support for the modem vendor, but they were of no help and I returned the product. Buying a different brand of ADSL modem did not solve the problem either and I had to return the second modem too. After all this my broadband provider finally sent a technician to my home. He accidentally solved the problem by explaining that not all models of ADSL modems are approved and on the network provider’s list of recommended models. The two products I tried (from well-known vendors and found on the shelves of the major retailers Elgiganten and Onoff) were not on the list. He lent me an approved ADSL modem to test and it worked perfectly.

So much money, time, inconvenience and frustration would have been saved if they had 1) informed their customers with old modems that they would stop working properly after an upgrade in network download speed 2) explained that there was a risk in buying the cheapest product off the shelf at the nearest retailer.

On another occasion I discovered a strange anomaly (bug?) in my Nokia N95. I called Nokia customer service, they said that they would call back, but they never did. I have also had very negative experiences with IKEA’s customer support. I am surprised that the mediocre quality of IKEA furniture has not drawn more attention.

Compared to Sweden, customers in the US are more demanding and far less submissive. The dismissive and paternalistic attitude shown by many Swedish companies would not work for a second in the US. The right to have your support call transferred to a manager is taken for granted by American customers. I find it insanely counter-productive to refuse customers the right to speak to a manager.

A manager with good people skills can defuse an angry customer and prevent the situation from escalating. Sometimes it might be enough if the customer is allowed to rant about the bad treatment they got from the support staff. Direct feedback from customers to a manager is also an effective way to monitor the quality of the first line support staff.

I understand that operators want to contain the costs of customer support. I also understand that employees should be encouraged to keep their support calls brief. But it is clear that many operators and product vendors shoot themselves in the foot by cost cutting that only aggravates dissatisfied customers even further.

The call to customer service might be the only direct contact the customer ever has with the operator. Depending on whether the experience was positive or negative that particular customer will form strong opinions about the company – and most likely spread them in his/her network.

At the same time as the VP Customer Service manages to cut costs and keep the budget, the VP Marketing is forced to ask for a larger budget for brand building and marketing to counter a negative brand perception. Anyone connecting the dots?

Satio smartphone with camera

Unfortunately, I think they have made a serious design mistake in their choice of camera. For marketers that are used to the IT industry’s logic that “more is always better” it is a given that cramming as many pixels as possible into the smartphone is a desirable goal. Sony Ericsson’s motivation is that the Facebook generation wants an easy way to take high quality pictures. That is correct, but a 12 MP camera phone is not the answer.

The problem is that a sensor with a lot of megapixels diminishes the ability to take good pictures in low light which, for most users, is much more important than taking high resolution pictures with 4000 x 3000 pixels. Sony Ericsson (SEMC) will run into problems when disappointed buyers realize how limited the camera is in practical usage.

12 megapixels used in the tiny sensors in a camera phone is not the same as 12 MP used in larger DSLR cameras. The number of megapixels is not the only performance factor. How tightly each pixel is packed on the sensor (Mpix/cm²) is of equal importance. If too many pixels are crammed on a sensor that is less than a square centimeter (6 × 4.5 mm if Sony’s new sensor is used in the Satio) each pixel will be so tiny that the physical limitations of the number of photons that can hit this pixel will determine the capability to produce an image.

If the camera sensor is viewed as a football field filled with buckets, the photons can be viewed as a rain of billiard balls that fall down in the buckets. Each bucket is one pixel. Stronger light produces many billiard balls which increases the precision when the number of balls in each bucket is counted. Weak lighting conditions (few billiard balls falling down) might work if each bucket is large enough to at least catch a few balls. But if the same number of buckets is crammed into a handball field each bucket will only be the size of drinking glass and the errors (noise) will be much larger because the billiard balls are too few to fill up all the small glasses.

For pictures taken in direct sunlight in the middle of the day or with a strong flash, the lowest sensitivity (ISO 100) is sufficient. Under these lighting conditions a small sensor (the handball field) is almost on par with a large sensor (the football field). There are still differences in quality because the optics in a small sensor camera is always inferior to larger, high quality optics. Quality differences are also caused by the fact that the leading camera vendors (Nikon and Canon) have more experience with electronic image processing than new players such as SEMC.

But as soon as you take pictures in low light and have to increase sensor sensitivity to ISO 400, 800 (or even higher) the difference between a large and a small sensor with the same megapixel count becomes dramatic.

In web forums such as Nikonians and review sites like DPReview most pro photographers and photo nerds have been in agreement about this for a long time. They are generally skeptical about small point-and-shoot cameras since the image noise level becomes unacceptable indoors or with low lighting. They are also critical about the way the vendors try to compensate for mediocre image quality with exaggerated electronic post-processing, by saturating the colors and by increasing edge sharpness. The result is quite often pictures that look unnatural. The table below shows the differences in the sensor area and pixel density for a selection of digital cameras and camera phones.

Sensor format and pixel density

Notice in the table above that the value for pixel density (megapixel per square centimeter) should be as low as possible. That figure is a measure of how densely the pixels are packed on the sensor and it is of almost equal importance as the number of megapixels. With a sensor area of 27 mm² Satio will have a sensor in the same range as the smallest point-and-shoot cameras. This will give Satio a pixel density of 44 megapixels per square centimeter which is very high.

Another observation from the table is that there are large differences in the sensor area between the camera types. The sensor in most DSLRs is around 350 mm². Compare this with the sensor in compact cameras which is between 28 and 40 mm². The sensor in a DSLR has an area that is twelve times larger than the smallest compact digital camera, thus providing twelve times higher capacity to collect light.

The first vendor to use a small sensor with fewer megapixels which is optimized for maximum low light performance will capture an empty market segment. There are no products on the market today to fill this latent demand. A few years ago Fuji released the Finepix F31fd camera, a 6 Mpix compact camera using a larger sensor with very good low light performance. It was even possible to take decent night pictures without a flash at ISO 1600 which no other compact camera had ever managed. When Fuji discontinued the model the camera gained cult status and the used prices on eBay have sometimes been close to double the new price.

Of course a company should not design their products for the nerd market. However, it is worthwhile to listen to advanced users. In this case they are right, high sensitivity in low light is relevant for everyone. Taking pictures indoors of your friends without being forced to use flash is perfect for the Facebook generation.

That the mass market customer believes “the more megapixels a camera has the better it is” is natural given that almost all marketing from the vendors has focused on megapixels. However, sooner or later the well-founded criticism of the megapixel obsession (e.g. from the New York Times’ technology editor) will bring awareness to the general public.

The only major advantage with a high megapixel sensor in a camera phone is that you can zoom in electronically without a disastrous loss of resolution. The electronic zoom only provides magnification from the center of the sensor if the lens has no moving parts. However, the marketers’ obsession with large zoom range (12x for Satio) is also criticized by those who actually use these cameras. Even if a camera has image stabilization is not enough to compensate for the fact that light sensitivity and resolution deteriorate significantly with electronic zooming. The New York Times points out that a good wide angle range is more important (so you can take pictures of all your friends around the dinner table) than useless telezooms.

A manufacturer that launches a camera (or cam phone) with a smaller zoom range and superior low light performance but with fewer megapixels can easily communicate user value. A marketing message could be built on comparing test pictures or copy text such as: “No flash at the wedding”, “Say goodbye to washed out flash images”, “Take pictures without anyone noticing”, etc.

If Sony Ericsson wants to reduce the pixel density my suggestion is that they develop a much more light sensitive sensor of the same size with a resolution of 2400 × 1800 pixels. This resolution will deliver 4.3 MPix pictures and the pixel density will be 15.9 Mpix/cm² which is much better than 44. A resolution of 2400 × 1800 pixels should be comparable to the resolution of a typical PC screen. Most screens have a lower resolution of 1680 × 1050 or 1920 × 1080, which means that the picture’s size has to be reduced in order to fit on the screen. Even larger 24 inch and 27 inch screens don’t have a higher resolution than 1920 × 1200. (Since most digital pictures are only displayed on a screen and never printed on paper, the higher resolution requirements for printing are not as relevant here.)

Sony Ericsson’s Satio as a case study

For Sony Ericsson’s sake one has to hope that the Satio will be well received by the market and that all the other advanced features are enough to convince the customers, in spite of the problems with the camera, to buy the smartphone. SEMC’s choice of camera is of general interest for product strategists in the tech sector and I will use it as case for an analysis of how the process went wrong (from my perspective as an outsider) and give some free advice to SEMC:

• Do not allow internal politics within the Sony Ericsson alliance to govern product development. If Sony was given the responsibility of product development for the camera just because they have their own camera division it was mistake. As a camera maker Sony is weak brand. For instance, their DSLR division is built on Sony’s 2006 acquisition of two budget brands (Minolta/Konica) that were too weak to survive the competition from Nikon and Canon. Just because Sony developed a 12 Mpix sensor that they adapted for camera phones does not mean that SEMC should be forced to use that sensor.

• That SEMC did not pay attention to photographers’ discussions on forums and in product reviews is a sign of weak competitive intelligence and consumer insight. Criticism of the megapixel race and clumsy image post-processing is readily available on the Internet. Even though SEMC has no intention of developing cameras they need to be competent buyers of the camera module.

• SEMC (or another vendor) should be brave enough to go against the group think in the industry. Unfortunately, most consumer camera manufacturers have been technology driven in the wrong way, for example in their obsession with zoom range and megapixels. (My impression is that SEMC is stuck in the same pattern. A few years ago I spoke with one of the senior executives at a conference about the downsides of the megapixel race. My concerns were completely dismissed.) In addition, the vendors have also had a Microsoft-style ambition to fill their products with 100s of unnecessary, silly functions such as smile detection. At the same time they have neglected to implement basic functions such as lossless rotation of JPG pictures. (The last time I checked this in 2007, several compact cameras degraded image quality if they were rotated 90 degrees.) By breaking conventions and getting it right it is possible to gain a strong competitive advantage. Just look at the iPhone.

• SEMC should have procured technologies from leading vendors with strong brands. Nokia uses Zeiss optics in their high end camera phones, which improves the image quality somewhat. SEMC could have done the same or partnered with Leica. In the built-in camera module Sony sells as an add-on to their new 12 MP sensor the lens is made of plastic. Plastic!

• Using the same argument, SEMC should have bought the software for noise reduction, color balance etc. from Nikon or Phase One (though Nikon would probably refuse to sell their technology to a company affiliated with Sony).

• SEMC should already prepare for an immediate launch of the next model ”Satio II” this fall if Satio fails on the market. It should use a 4.3 Mpix sensor designed for low light and use a smaller zoom range (3x).

This article has previously been published on my Swedish blog.

There are a number of situations where 30 seconds is simply too short, for example: If you are in the middle of a noisy street you might not hear the signal immediately. If you are at home and don’t take the phone with you when you move to another room or floor. The phone might be tucked away in a zipped pocket, or a woman might have the phone in a handbag. Smartphones are larger and clumsier and users often don’t want them in their clothing but put them away in a briefcase or bag. And if you want to read the display to see who is calling and then think for a few seconds about whether you want to take the call even more time is consumed before answering.

Personally, I prefer to use a ring signal that vibrates for the first 15 seconds. However, this is impossible as it only leaves 15 seconds to take the call if you miss the silent vibration signal. I have been prepared to switch to another operator to get a 45, 60 or 90 second ring signal. Unfortunately all the Swedish operators I checked (Telia, Tre, Tele2, Telenor, Halebop, Djuice) do not offer more than a 30 second ring signal. (I haven’t checked this for other countries.)

This is yet another example of how companies in the tech sector that invest huge resources in market research, focus groups and customer segmentation can miss the basics. The giants in the industry compete so intensely with the latest advanced technology that they devote more attention to their competitors and new cool features than on their own customers.

As I have said before, the problem is that the industry does not understand the customer’s micro situation and the context in which he or she is using the product. Since voice is still the most important revenue source for the operators, any improvement in this service will have a direct impact on the bottom line. The operators are mistaken if they view voice as a boring cash cow with low status that is impossible to improve or develop. Just look at Google Voice to get an idea of the potential for improvement.

This article has previously been published on my Swedish blog.

This article has previously been published on my Swedish blog.

Google Voice’s core offer is ”one phone number for life”. New customers get a phone number which is connected to their server and from a web interface the user can forward the call to one or several of his/her fixed or mobile phones. Via the web it is possible to manage all your incoming voicemails, SMS, missed calls, etc. with an interface that resembles Gmail (Google states that a future full integration with Gmail is planned).

Voicemails in English are translated to text and the user can choose to receive them as SMS, email or read them on the web. Incoming calls can be managed by a menu: “press 1 to respond, press 2 to send to voicemail, press 3 to listen to incoming message, press 4 to respond and record the call”. Different outgoing voicemail messages can be used depending on if the call is from your boss or your parents. It is also possible to block certain numbers late at night. Outgoing domestic calls (including conference calls) are free and the international tariffs are much lower than SkypeOut.

Both the technology and the ideas for this have been around for a long time. Call forwarding with *21* has been available since the 80s (if I recall correctly). The Unified Mailbox was a compelling vision in the late 90s, and number portability has also existed for over a decade.

If the telco operators hadn’t been so slow to innovate they could have been able to do this themselves, or bought GrandCentral two years ago. Google and all the other Telco2 startups are now running rings around the telcos because IP and the web make it much easier to quickly deploy new services. As long as the telcos stay stuck in a worldview w here every new services have to be built on an industrial scale and integrated in the network before they can be launched it is inevitable that they will continue to lose out to more agile players.

And on the few occasions when the telcos develop innovative services they shoot themselves in the foot by developing proprietary systems, locking in the users, and overcharging. One example is iobi from Verizon that was launched in 2004 – one year before GrandCentral. The service is similar to GrandCentral/GoogleVoice but is only available to Verizon customers. Their high monthly fees ($7.95 for consumers and $11.95 for businesses) prevent iobi from becoming a mass market leader and they have not licensed the software platform to any other players. The fact that customers will lose all their personal data if they cancel the service makes it even more unattractive to sign up with iobi.

This article has previously been published on my Swedish blog.

The projects conducted by Mobile Life were somewhat disparate, however, they have worked quite a lot with expressions for emotions and the integration of sensors that can measure things such as body temperature and heart rate in new applications (e.g. the project Affective Health). The prototype FriendSense (see picture) is similar to a Twitter that uses images and colors to capture how the members of a group feel and whether they have cold or warm feelings for other people in the group. In ActDresses you can control the behavior of a robot (a doll) by dressing it in different clothing. The project Mobile 2.0 covers a number of more mainstream mobile applications with integration of maps, geo-tagged pictures, friends’ pictures, geo-tagged chat rooms, friend finders on the subway, etc.

FriendSense

SwarmCam is an application where users can upload streamed video from their mobiles to a mixer with editing capabilities. Envisioned applications are a DJ that can show videos from the dance floor on a large screen and real time citizen journalism from, for example, an accident site.

The project e-Adept which is a co-operation with the City of Stockholm develops services which enable handicapped pedestrians to get exact walking instructions. Geographical micro-data have been coded for objects such as park benches, crosswalks, stairs and lampposts. With the aid of a PDA with GPS and voice output, blind people can navigate in the city streets. Other projects focused on different aspects of Pervasive Games where the players move around in an urban environment aided by GPS and their mobile phones.

In her speech, the center director professor Kristina Höök addressed how mobile data facilitates a breakdown of the old closed telecom paradigm and that the mobile Glasnost is now entering a phase of mobile service revolution.

The keynote address was given by design professor William Gaver from Interaction Research Studio at the well-known Goldsmiths, University of London. I like the policy at Goldsmiths (Damien Hirst is a former student) which demands the highest academic standards from their creative departments. The projects Gaver’s research team have worked on display an impressive creative madness. How about the idea of placing a piece of furniture as the Double Deck Desk (see picture) in an office to study how people interact with it? It is a good sign that Mobile Life has succeeded in building networks with other leading institutions in the field such as Goldsmiths.

Double Deck Desk

As it is hard to objectively determine the difference between genial creativity and things that are just odd and pointless there is always the risk that resources are wasted on bad projects. The fact that design and creativity are subjective can unfortunately be an excuse for not setting the standards as high as they are in areas that can be quantified and measured. The way leading arts schools (such as the Royal Institute of Art in London or the Art Institute of Chicago) have solved this problem is to ensure that the creative leadership is in the hands of extremely talented people. These creative leaders are confident in their assessment abilities and use brutal honesty to uphold high quality standards by rejecting subpar project proposals. I assume that Goldsmiths has a similar system.

The reason for my elaborate digression is the failure of a similar Swedish strategic research project, The Interactive Institute. The story of its failure is a textbook example of how not to manage national strategic research.

The background can be traced to the former Persson government which became aware of the Internet around 1997. At that time, the MIT Media Lab was the center of media attention and the Swedish government asked the MIT Media Lab if it wanted to open a research center in Sweden. The MIT Media Lab knew the value of their brand and asked for $100 million (if I remember the figure correctly) just to begin working with the Swedish government. After that slap in face, the Swedish government decided to start on their own. The outcome was the Interactive Institute, with an annual budget of 100 million Swedish kronor, which made it one of the largest budgets in the world after the MIT Media Lab. The idea was that interaction designers, scientists and artists would work together and develop new creative concepts.

For politicians the populistic elements must have been irresistible: an aggressive investment in the future, flashing lights, bright colors and animation, kids skateboarding in the corridors doing cool things. What a joy to be connected to all this youthful vibrancy. Tony Blair had paved the way a few years earlier by introducing “Cool Britannia”. In addition, government ministers could bring foreign guests to the expensive office floors at Östermalm in central Stockholm and show something that was visually appealing and easy to understand.

The invested resources did not produce any lasting results. I believe the failure was due to the lack of professionalism and quality in recruitments and execution. Collaboration and developing networks with leading institutions were neglected. Direct political interference and decisions governed by regional policy is not the right way to build a world class research environment. When I visited their open house demos around 2000 I hardly found any interesting projects. In an international academic review in 2003 they received damning criticism.

The situation for Mobile Life is much better. They managed to secure funding in a highly competitive academic environment. The problem for Mobile Life is rather how they will manage to differentiate themselves from commercial product development.

Comparing with the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s might be unfair because they were in a much better position to make themselves interesting at that time. MIT had the resources to implement and test new interactive services before the technological infrastructure was deployed in the rest of society. They became a demonstrator for all the new cool applications that everybody could envision in theory but were unable to implement in 1996.

Today there is a huge industry with tons of start-ups, entrepreneurs, and major corporations that develop these services for the marketplace. This makes it much harder for the academic world to advance and produce innovative products.
In a world where iPhone, Twitter and Facebook already exist, academics will have to choose peripheral and sometimes unintuitive projects to avoid replicating commercial product development.

As usual, one gets updated through the grapevine at these events. The most interesting fact that I can write about is that the head of Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise lab, Henrik Pålsson is now stationed in India. He said that the reason for his move is that the Indian market is developing very quickly right now. It is notable that Ericsson has relocated its most senior user market expert from Lund, Sweden to India.