Last week at the Wired conference, a speaker pointed out this fact from 2008, probably even more relevant today than ever:
Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%.
I you test with users, they probably won’t notice 100ms differences. But overall it changes behaviors. At this level impatience becomes almost unconscious.
Upcoming events I will attend/speak at:
Wired Conference (Oct 13-14)
Looking forward to attend the first edition (firsts are always special) of the Wired UK conference, curated by the great Monique Van Dusseldorp.
Swiss ICT Awards (Oct 18)
I will attend Switzerland’s largest ICT prize in Luzern, hoping to maybe bring a trophy back home :)
HEG Genève (Nov. 3)
I will teach a 3 hours course on managing innovation at the HEG Genève. This is part of the (many) teaching assignments the Lift team took for 2011/2012.
Forum économique de Glion (Nov. 11)
I will attending the forum for the first time, participating on a panel about entrepreneurship.
Solvaxis Userday 2011 (Nov. 24)
I will keynote at the Userday, presenting the latest technological developments and trends. Join me at the Stade de Suisse in Bern on November 24.
If you would like me to speak at your event, please contact me.
I did a quick interview on Facebook’s latest developments, in last week’s Matin Dimanche:
Le fil d’actualité informera automatiquement et en temps réel vos amis de ce que vous regardez, écoutez ou lisez. Un exploit technologique qui pourrait aboutir à bien des quiproquos. «Il y aura des drames, c’est certain, prédit Laurent Haug, fondateur des conférences Lift consacrées aux nouvelles technologies. Imaginez un passionné d’histoire qui regarde une vidéo sur Hitler: il a des risques de passer pour un nazi. » Idem pour le papa qui visionne le dernier clip de Rihanna pour comprendre les goûts musicaux de sa fille et qui passera pour une midinette auprès de ses amis et collègues.
Avec ces bouleversements, les plus importants depuis sa création, Facebook poursuit, imperturbable, sa logique du partage total des informations. Mais les utilisateurs sont-ils prêts à sacrifier leur vie privée? Les premières réactions oscillent entre enthousiasme et inquiétude. «Les utilisateurs ont envie de partager, mais veulent garder le contrôle, estime Laurent Haug. Après c’est une question d’équilibre: si le réseau social va trop loin et perd leur confiance, ils publieront moins d’informations. Or Facebook en a besoin pour faire de l’argent. »
I was on the Swiss national radio yesterday, discussing Google+ and competition among social networks.
Google +: c’est le nom du nouveau réseau social lancé par le géant de l’Internet. Ce site n’est pourtant pas si nouveau puisqu’il existe depuis trois mois déjà, mais pour y être, il fallait avoir reçu une invitation. Depuis ce mercredi en revanche, tout le monde peut donc s’inscrire sur cette plateforme d’échanges. C’est un réseau social de plus, qui vient concurrencer Facebook et Twitter.
L’interview de Laurent Haug (mp3) fondateur de Lift, conférence des nouvelles technologies
A fascinating comparison of pre teens aspirations, today vs 25 years ago. Much of the evolution of society can be seen in these numbers. From middle class, scientific, requiring-long-studies jobs to entertainment, instantaneous, artistic professions.
Careers in teaching, banking and science have suffered the biggest fall in popularity over the last 25 years according to a new generational study which reveals a seismic shift in career aspirations within the space of a single generation.
The study reveals that for many of today’s pre-teens, traditional careers have been superseded by the desire for fame, stardom and celebrity and suggests that the media is now just as influential, if not more so, than parental advice when it comes to potential careers.
Top ten career aspirations of pre teens
Today
25+ years ago
1 Sportsman 12%
2 Popstar 11%
3 Actor 11%
4 Astronaut 9%
5 Lawyer 9%
6 Emergency services 7%
7 Medicine 6%
8 Chef 5% 8
9 Teacher 4%
10 Vet 3%1 Teacher 15%
2 Banking/ finance 9%
3 Medicine 7%
4 Scientist 6%
5 Vet 6%
6 Lawyer 6%
7 Sportsman 5%
8 Astronaut 4%
9 Beautician/hairdresser 4%
10 Archeologist 3%
Several quick ideas coming from a report published by GlobalWebIndex, available on SlideShare. Sorry for the raw dump of quotes, it is meant to encourage you to read the full document that contains interesting pieces of information.
Sharing on Facebook is declining:
Facebook’s valuation is largely based on quality of the data and the ability to target consumers based on this data. However active sharing of data is in decline. Most users are increasingly passive.
The global aspects promised by technologies are reaching their limits. You need to go local (and speak people’s language):
“No such thing as a global online strategy. Localisation is key online”
About the business model of online:
“It is a myth that consumers won’t pay for content online”
How the changes in information circulation affects journalists (hint: it made them more relevant):
“Transmitter culture makes journalists, media owners, content producers and brands more relevant in the online economy”
What do we expect from brands?
“Consumers want brands to improve their knowledge. Much like apple does, blurring of marketing and information”
I found this article interesting, because it puts words on something that most knowledge workers experience on a daily basis (without really thinking of it as a condition or a problem). Let’s talk about decision fatigue:
We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. [...]
“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.
Interesting article about how “automation addiction” has eroded pilots’ flying skills, to the point that it is has contributed to “hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years”. Scary, one more point for the whole “technology is making us stupid” (example here) point of view.
Pilots’ “automation addiction” has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don’t know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.
Some 51 “loss of control” accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association.
Here is an interview I did for Canvas8, to discuss our constantly changing, sometimes troubled relationship with technology and the impact it has upon our lives. I explain why we already use the technologies of the future every day but barely notice them.
What are the biggest cultural shifts/drivers influencing technological innovation at the moment?
I think people themselves are making the most impact on technologies. It has been quite a shift, one that took a lot of time to happen. Back in the early days, technologies would show up without much effort being put into their usability. As users we simply had to adapt to them, and because technologies were mastered by a small elite, there was barely any feedback coming from the bottom to the top. Technologies provided such a leap from the past ways of doing things – the leap from the typewriter to the word processor, for example – that the general attitude would be “it’s good enough, I can live with the unfriendly interface and limitations”.
Then users started to be more savvy, to feel better about their own capacity to have an idea that could make a particular technology better. Many technologies became the work of teams open to feedback, and some projects even turned completely transparent and open source (not only in software, but also in hardware). Today, innovation is really driven by users, in all their diversity, with all their specific needs, and they are changing technology more than the technologists themselves, creating new uses for a specific tool by translating it into their own languages, contributing bug reports and new ideas, and hacking commercial devices to make them better suited to their needs. For example, Twitter has developed into its own self-perpetuating ecosystem through the input of ordinary users.
What were the hot topics at Lift ’11 – the ideas that particularly resonated with people?
Two ideas really struck me: one speaker, Kevin Slavin, talked about the importance of algorithms. I heard again a couple of days ago an expert on financial markets explaining how the recent movements in the markets were “driven by computers” who “probably lacked some form of human supervision because of the August vacations”. Machines are playing a huge role in our society, to an extent that I was not aware of, and this raises a lot of questions. For example, who will be responsible when an accident happens involving an automated car?
The second idea which I found fascinating emerged from the talk of Hasan Elahi. He showed how technologies can be turned back, and provide a form of privacy through over-sharing. He basically games the system of surveillance, and gives us a nice hint for the future. We might not be losing our privacy; privacy is simply not something you are granted at birth as in the past. Now you have to build a smokescreen around your identity.
Why do technologies fail? Is it enough to create something that’s relevant or useful – and how do you define those terms?
Because we mostly think about technologies, rarely about their usage. For a long time, innovation was in the hands of people who could not necessarily show the appropriate level of empathy. What I mean is that it takes a certain mindset, and some distance, to be able to say “this is how people will use my product”. Most of the time, we fall in love with the technology we create, and we forget to take that love out of the equation when evaluating whether our work will be used by people or not. It is a basic mistake, very true in video games for example. People get fascinated by their own creation, only to find out that it has no appeal to the general public. The truth is, users determine whether a technology is successful. They don’t care about the technical achievement, or the beauty of a particular solution. They want answers to their problems, and some technologies provide that, while others bring more complications than solutions.
To what extent does adoption of technology play into social dynamics?
Adoption mirrors social dynamics. Think of Facebook or Google+: if you are the only user, these technologies have no interest at all. Just like in social dynamics, we need groups to achieve certain things, and technologies do not allow us to escape life’s fundamental rules. We are connected, but still talking about views, attention, feedback, likes, visits. Technology mirrors ‘real life’ most of the time.
There’s been lots of discussion and development but, beyond science fiction, why are robots relevant to us now?
Robots are not science fiction. They are part of our daily life, but we barely notice them. Movies brought the dream of having an humanoid helper in every home – and the bestselling robot in 2011 is an autonomous vacuum cleaner. This revolution is happening, but most people (and the media) are missing it for two reasons: it has been promised to us for such a long time it is hardly at the front of many people’s minds, and what we expected is not what is happening, hence a false sense of inertia while it is one of the most active fields today.They are relevant to us because their logic is increasingly part of our lives. Robots are basically a way to automate tasks we don’t want to do, or that can be done better by computers. And when we look around us we see more and more automation, more and more self-controlled devices.
There’s an emerging trend for quantifying the self and others, driven by a desire for self-improvement. How might this evolve?
We are not just using machines to do what we do not want to do, but rather to do supplementary things, to augment our lives. This opens new possibilities that I find interesting, because we could become more aware of how we live. At the same time, this quantification is scary. I believe all the technology in the world will never replace a good discussion between a patient and a doctor, and this computerisation of our lives also disconnects us from more natural processes. It’s like talking to a friend to know that you are not doing enough sport, rather than having your watch remind you your body fat just went up.
What, to you, is the most significant technological development of the last five years and how do you see it evolving in the next five?
I think open and free-for-all collaboration was massive. The evolution of Wikipedia is interesting. At first, it made sense to open contributions to all, as there was no structure inside the community. There were no experts, nobody had a track record of providing consistently good information, nobody wanted to vandalise the pages because a Wikipedia page was meaningless. That was the first step, when we discovered the potential of opening things up, and letting people collaborate.
But then success came in, and brought with it a number of side effects: a link from Wikipedia was worth a lot, so people started to pollute articles with links to their own sites. Vandals defaced some pages and many debates opened up on controversial topics. Rules had to be put in place to limit openness, and several fundamentals had to be reinvented. People were not equal any more, and super users began to appear.
I find it fascinating how collective intelligence will evolve under the attacks of ‘massification’ and success, how those processes of open collaboration and trust will scale to millions of people and projects around the world. That’s a very, very hard problem and I believe a new order will emerge in the next five years.
How do you see technology use shifting in the near future, and what’s driving it?
I believe one of the things that will happen is that we will push back technology. An increasing number of people are worried about the effect of technologies on their life. For example, the more we connect on Facebook, the more we seem to disconnect from the things that matter to us (real friends). Or the time it takes to deal with email, which at this pace will soon become an ‘unproductivity’ tool.
The next evolution I see happening with some early adopters is that technology is put back in its place: as a tool, not an end in itself. People control how many networks they participate in, choose to shut down their phones more often, declare some ‘no-email days’, and decide to delete all emails that came during their vacations. More and more signs point to us reclaiming a bit of space from those technologies that have invaded our lives to an extent that was barely imaginable 15 years ago.
Interview conducted by Debbi Evans
This is a short chronicle (in French) I wrote for L’Hebdo, to be published in an upcoming edition. Comments welcome!
Je me souviens des années 90, et de mes premiers pas sur internet à l’université. A cette époque, avoir un mail ou un mobile faisait de moi un membre de la tribu des geeks, que Wikipedia définit comme un « jeune (de préférence adolescent), féru de sciences, qui s’intéresse également aux nouvelles technologies ». Un cliché qui se meurt aujourd’hui.
Un rapide coup d’œil dans la rue suffit à le confirmer : presque tout le monde est connecté. La suisse présente selon l’ITU un taux de pénétration des mobiles de 122% ( !), et 75% de la population utilise Internet.
Deuxième constat : les femmes sont plus nombreuses et plus actives sur certains sites (comme Facebook), et il suffit de se rendre dans le rayon jeux vidéos d’un grand magasin pour constater que la moitié des titres visent un public féminin.
Enfin, les technologies sont utilisées par toutes les tranches d’âges, des grands parents qui skypent pour voir leurs petits enfants grandir, aux gamins de 9 ans qui mentent sur leur âge pour ouvrir un compte Facebook.
Le geek a vécu. Et a stigmatisé le développement des technologies dans notre société. Désormais nous sommes tous geek!
Contact:
Tel +41786966480
Email laurent@liftlab.com
Skype: laurenthaug
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