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Service Innovation and SaaS

Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Services Innovation unit at SenterNovem and the Economic Affairs department. Focus was on how SaaS is one of the important enabling foundations of service innovations. Service innovation is possible through advancements in ICT but ICT is not a transparent factor that makes everything possible. Some functionalities are easy to achieve whereas some are hard or impossible due to the quirky nature of technology.
However, often to little attention is given to the relation between business goals and ICT possibilities. Our statement is that both need explicit attention.

Ez Sn Kenniscommunity

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The presentation is ended with a call to start working on a national testbed infrastructure for the development of SaaS services. Espcially a country like the Netherlands can be strong in delivering services by “mashing up” all kinds of basic services due to our strengths in trade. In the development of the inrastructure needed to create an agile business community capable of creating and delivering services worldwide there certainly is a role for the government.

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Aging 0.5

The aging society is I think one of the big issues that as society we will have to deal with in the future. We do know that there will simply be not enough hands to help the aging people in a way that is personnel. Technology can help a lot but has the risk of creating a too mechanical care. A special lift can help you out of bed but will not talk to you.
That is why I like projects where technology helps us by connecting people and give care in a way that is friendly and personnel. Like this project or this. In the second project my favourite moment was when the elderly lady is told that there is a camera in the Aibo and here reaction is: oh nice, it can see me?
However, today I read that there are even bigger problems in an aging world. In Japan people that turn 100 receive a special silver cup. Only there are so many people turning a 100 now that they had to reduce the size of the cup in order to save money! In 1963, the first year they started this program, only a 153 people turned 100. This year a mind boggling 19,769 turned 100!!!
I think this shows in a symbolical way the challenges we will face the future decades. You can read more about it here.

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Privacy 0.2

Yesterday I heard an interesting item on the television. In Weesp there had been some threats made towards schools over the phone. In the end it turned out to be little children that made them.
Interesting part is how the police found out who they were. The boys made the call to the schools on a public payphone, thinking the04_07_63-cctv-security-camera_weby would not be traceable that way. Of course the police could easily find out which payphone was used but by the time they were there the boys were long gone. However, the police was able to acquire several images of video camera’s close by that had the boys on tape while they were making their calls. By showing these video images on national television the parents recognised them and immediately took them to the police station (brave action!).
This case does show, even though the outcome is rather positive in this case, that it is more and more possible to follow people and in the end, invade privacy of civilians. Technology allows us to follow anyone we want in many places.
Remember, you are being watched!

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Power to the People

info-graphicGoogle is very much working on ways to stimulate conservation of energy. One of the issues they mention on their blog is that by giving feedback to people it is possible to save lots of energy in homes and offices. Some time ago I was involved in a research study where we looked at research worldwide on this subject. One of the most remarkable ones was a study done in Stavanger, Norway. There it turned out that just by changing the period after which people settle their energy bill (you get a bill every month normally but only once a year the energy company checks if the bill is the same as the real (average) use during the year). They changed the period from one year to two months (meaning the amount used was checked bi-monthly and the bill adapted accordingly). The energy use of households after this went down 8%. Because of the bi-monthly check people where immediately reminded that energy costs a lot during winter. With some extra data the savings grew to 12 to 16%.
This feedback on use can be more fine-grained. At home I am using a plug from plugwise that measures the use of energy of that energy outlet and allows me to test how much I would save by using the built in “stand-by killer” during the night (it is amazing how much energy some appliances use while on standby, my printer uses a whopping 40 watts on standby, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). An interesting example how ICT can help to lower our energy footprint. Some time ago I also made a blog on a presentation I gave last year.
In Amsterdam we are setting up a project with more than 700 homes where we will be testing what kind of feedback works best (Amsterdam Smart City). Another project I am starting with is the Connected Urban Development where we make it possible to take a look on the energy use in the city and be able to zoom into certain areas, maybe even to an individual level.
The document with the research (like the Stavanger case) you can find here.
It’s the kind of projects that give me a lot of energy!

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Longing for latitude

One of the interesting features of technologies is how it can bring people close together, in real life as well as in perception. Google has an interesting new feature called Google Latitude. Through this service you can show your location to your friends and of course see the location that your friends are sharing with you. Interesting feature is that the application has a fine grained way of setting your privacy in relation to the various friends that you have. This I think is a general direction you see in web 2.0 that more and more people are becoming concerned about privacy and about who really are your friends you are willing to share all. In the past I used an application called IYOUIT that was also capable of showing this like this. To me it was surprising how much feeling is involved in knowing precisely where your friends are.
location of friends

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Everyware

One of the most interesting developments I see at the moment is the move to ubiquitous ICT. ICT in the form of small unobtrusive sensors, smart ICT that takes the context of the user into account (based on all those sensors) and feedback mechanisms to users that do not use explicit displays do this much more on an “experience” level, e.g. by changing the colour of light. I recently read a book called Everyware (as in Hardware and Software) that says some interesting things on this. Sort of like using computers without really using a computer….
A very nice example of this is the “unpronounceable rabbit“. It connects to the Internet, is able to sniff RFID tags and communicate by talking, changing colours, communicates with his ears and all kinds of other things. And the rabbits can talk to eachother so you can send messages to a friend by just twisting his ears.

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Innovation

At the moment I am very much involved in Living Labs. Living Labs are an important development in research, design and development. At the core of the living labs idea is that the gap between design and reality is growing. More and more products and services have social networking aspects or location aware functionality. These aspects are very hard to simulate in a normal laboratory like Home lab at  Philips.
Amsterdam Living Lab is the initiative that we are starting in, surprise, Amsterdam. Here we are changing Amsterdam in a large scale laboratory, together with Waag Society, University  of Amsterdam and Telematica Instituut. Together we try to create new design, develop and test processes based on real life user experience. For this measurement tools and sensor to measure reality will be developed and new design processes that take this real life data into account.
More locations in the Netherlands are developing such an approach. Living Lab Leiden is involved in development of wireless services, Rotterdam Climate Initiative is developing new approaches to saving energy. Approaches that take the real life behaviour of people into account. For the Innovatieplatform I am working a plan to strengthen this ecosystem of initiatives and promote the capabilities national and international.
Next week the Innovatieplatform is organising a big day on innovation in the Netherlands. I am organising a track on Living Labs there too. Several Living Labs are  present and  some demo’s are given. So if you are interested, drop me a line. Meet you on third of December in Rotterdam.

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Google bank

Banks are of course very much the focus of the news these days. One of the interesting news items a journalist found out is that Google already has a banking license in the Netherlands. Bank are potentially one of the sectors that will change a lot because of business possibilities that a technology like SaaS will enable. Competition will come from completely new sectors because they are better at reaching the market or using the “intelligence of crowds”.
While searching a little further I found this blog post from Jeff Jarvis where he is asking for examples of bank services that Google would be very good at. Examples are peer to peer lending, more transparency around transactions in stocks, open source platforms to increase functionality (E-invoices anyone?).
In a way Google checkout and it’s competitor PayPal are already on the move. In my view banks really have to start thinking on how to really innovate their processes through which they create value for their customers.

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Flabbergasted

This is very interesting picture that shows the difference between the opportunities for saving energy between Europe and the USA. I do not think there are many households in the Netherlands that do not use a programmeable thermostat, often even integrated with a outside temperature sensor. This is something we have to keep in mind when comparing research on energy saving between the USA and Europe.

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Oops, sorry, forgot the attachment …

who does not know the feeling of feeling utterly silly when sending an e-mail in which you say that you are enclosing an attachment after which you forget to include the attachment. I know it happens to me and most people around me. But Google is paying attention!
They now have a new function where Google scans the text of you e-mail and when it thinks you intended to include an attachment it gives you a reminder. I think this is a nice example of paying attention to your users and deliver services that are based on looking what people are really doing and what really goes wrong while doing it.
I understand from the google groups that discusses this that it does not really work very well at the moment (it misses a lot of cues when there should be an attachment) but let’s hope they will get it right. At least they are trying …