June 2015 – Looking Forward

June 30, 2015

Intelligent Conversations: The New User Interface?

Recently there have been some interesting articles about how the graphic user interface we’ve had on our screens for many years is gradually being replaced by a new user interface – the conversation.

Earlier this month, Matt Gilligan wrote on his Medium blog:

Forget “there’s an app for that” — what’s next is “there’s a chat for that.”

And just a few days ago, WIRED magazine had an article titled “The Future of UI Design? Old-School Text Messages”.

Some of this is a result of the fact that people are more often using the web on their smart phones and tablets than on laptops and desktop computers. With bigger screens, the older devices have more room for a nice graphic interface than smartphones – even the newest smart phones that always seem to be bigger than the previous generation.

And many people communicate much of the day through conversations that are composed of text messages. There’s a good listing of some of the more innovative text apps in “Futures of text”.

The idea of a conversational interface is also a reflection of the use of various personal assistants that you talk to, like Siri. These, of course, have depended on developments in artificial technology, in particular the recognition and processing of natural (human) spoken language. Much research is being conducted to make these better and less the target of satire – like this one from the Big Bang Theory TV series.

There’s another branch of artificial intelligence research that should be resurrected from its relative oblivion to help out – expert systems. An expert system attempts to automate the kind of conversation – especially a dynamic, intelligent sequence of questions and answers – that would occur between a human expert and another person. (You can learn more at Wikipedia and GovLab.)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, expert systems were the most hyped part of the artificial intelligence community.

As I’ve blogged before, I was one of those involved with expert systems during that period. Then that interest in expert systems rapidly diminished with the rise of the web and in the face of various technological obstacles, like the hard work of acquiring expert knowledge. More recently, with “big data” being collected all around us, the big focus in the artificial intelligence community has been on machine learning – having AI systems figure out what that data means.

But expert systems work didn’t disappear altogether. Applications have been developed for medicine, finance, education and mechanical repairs, among other subjects.

It’s now worth raising the profile of this technology much higher if the conversation becomes the dominant user interface. The reason is simple: these conversations haven’t been very smart. Most of the apps are good at getting basic information as if you typed it into a web browser. Beyond that? Not so much.

There are even very funny videos of the way these work or rather don’t work well. Take a look at “If Siri was your mom”, prepared for Mother’s Day this year with the woman who was the original voice of Siri as Mom.

In its simplest form, expert systems may be represented as a smart decision tree based on the knowledge and research of experts.

It’s pretty easy to see how this approach could be used to make sure that the conversation – by text or voice – is useful for a person.

There is, of course, much more sophistication available in expert systems than is represented in this picture. For example, some can handle probabilities and other forms of ambiguity. Others can be quite elaborate and can include external data, in addition to the answers from a person – for example, his/her temperature or speed of typing or talking.

The original developers of Siri have taken what they’ve learned from that work and are building their next product. Called “Viv: The Global Brain”, it’s still pretty much in stealth mode so it’s hard to figure out how much expert system intelligence is built into it. But a story about them on WIRED last year showed an infographic which implies that an expert system has a role in the package. See the lower left on the second slide.

Personally I like the shift to a conversational interface with technology since it becomes available in so many different places and ways. But I’ll really look forward to it when those conversations become smarter. I’ll let you know as I see new developments.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/122879360432/intelligent-conversations-the-new-user-interface]

June 24, 2015

Collaboration vs. Competition For Economic Growth

Lots of talk about the economy focuses on how individual businesses compete. Generalizing from the situation of individual businesses, public officials who are responsible for the overall growth of their local economy also often talk about competition. Making their cities “competitive in the world economy” or enabling their “residents to compete" are frequent phrases you hear.

And they worry about where they stand in the competition with other cities.

Even in today’s global economy, the biggest cities still envision themselves as standing alone, in competition with all other jurisdictions.

And, of course, with cash, tax and other incentives, local economic development officials will try to steal – i.e., compete – with distant or even nearby jurisdictions.

Granted that sometimes the word “competitive” is used merely to mean prosperous or good or something else positive. But the use of the metaphor of competition can be misleading, even in those cases.

The fact that individual businesses often find themselves competing with
each other doesn’t mean that regions as a whole thrive by focusing on
competition with other regions.

Getting back to basics, an economy grows as people develop and exchange
specialized services/products and, in various ways, create new ideas and
services/products. The better connected and more collaborative the residents of a region are with everyone else, the more likely they are to be creating more wealth and income for themselves. This means that
overall economic growth of a region is much more about collaboration than
competition.

The value of collaboration has begun to be heard
in some parts of the economic development profession. For example, John Jung, Chairman of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), wrote “Collaborative Innovation – the New Competitive Edge for Economic Development”. From a conference on Global Competition and Collaboration in 2011, there was “New Building Blocks for Jobs and Economic Growth”. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania affirmed this idea: “We Need More Collaboration And Less Competition For Economic Growth”.

Unfortunately, most of the huge global cities have not yet seriously adopted this approach. In contrast, an increasing number of smaller cities, towns and rural areas have come to the realization that they have a better future if they cooperate, collaborate and network.

An interesting example is Mitchell, South Dakota, which has 15,000 people, but was among ICF’s Top 7 Most Intelligent Communities this year — among cities like Rio, New Taipei and Columbus Ohio. They were in trouble a decade ago. They had lost 30% of their population, especially young people, like many other small communities in the countryside.

Mitchell turned that situation around. They have three Internet service providers that deliver gigabit bandwidth. They’ve seen the growth of tech companies and precision agriculture. Their unemployment rate is 3%, with hundreds of open jobs. Unusual for a small city, it has its own workforce development director.

At the recent ICF Summit in Toronto, Bryan Hisel, Executive Director, Mitchell Area Development Corporation, put it simply: “entrepreneurship is our way of thinking here.” So the leaders of Mitchell view their small size as an advantage, not a disadvantage. That entrepreneurial culture of its people came before they had broadband.

With that entrepreneurial spirit, you’d think that Mitchel is all about the competition. But Hisel pointed out that all the things people elsewhere have started to talk about — especially collaboration — comes naturally to small communities. So Mitchell has extended its service to nearby communities and even provides advice to small cities that others might see as competitors.

Perhaps the tradition of collaboration in parts of the countryside is also why there was increased interest at the summit in my proposal for a global virtual metropolis that connects small cities like Mitchell – a connection for economic success that arises from collaboration rather than competition with one another.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/122336332341/collaboration-vs-competition-for-economic-growth]

June 17, 2015

Lessons From The Intelligent Community Forum Summit

Last week, the Intelligent Community Forum held its annual summit in Toronto. The underlying theme was “How Intelligent Communities Are Re-Inventing Urban and Rural Planning”, so much of the discussion was about re-invention and innovating.

In addition to the all-day workshops for large urban jurisdictions and smaller cities/towns/rural areas, all of Friday was devoted to Ideas Day – with a slew of presentations sharing novel approaches to local government and planning.

On Thursday, capping his successful 16 year run as mayor as he retires, Mayor Michael Coleman proudly accepted the award to Columbus, Ohio as the world’s most Intelligent Community this year.

(You can see the full agenda at icfsummit2015.com. The presentations, including mine, will be available on intelligentcommunity.org in the coming weeks.)

One of the other highlights of the week was the keynote speech by David Johnston, the Governor General of Canada spoke on June 10th. Before that, he was the President of the University Of Waterloo, Canada’s premier engineering school.

Since it was established in the late 1950s, it has become the cradle for a thriving tech innovation community – Blackberry being one if the best known examples. In part, for this reason, he was part of the team in the City of Waterloo who succeeded in being named the most Intelligent Community of the year in 2007.

He attributed its success to two policies that stand in contrast with the way that many universities try to contain the fruits of innovation within their campuses – thus actually diminishing their innovation.

The first policy is that the university makes no intellectual property claims on the research done by faculty, researchers or students. Instead they encourage them to commercialize their research and reap the rewards for themselves and the community.

The second policy requires coop education of all students. Each year, every student spends two trimesters in class and one working in a company (for pay) to apply what they’ve learned.

Finally, it’s worth noting that all of this – the need for innovation, the changes in ways in communities have to plan – is not happening in a vacuum.

To provide some urgency to these discussions and in case you don’t realize how fast things are changing in what are still the early days of the Internet, Rob McCann, President of ClearCable, gave an interesting presentation on the growth of Internet usage — increasing roughly 50% per year. (He also made a strong case for the involvement of local government in building out broadband networks, especially in less dense, more rural areas.)

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/121755138995/lessons-from-the-intelligent-community-forum]

June 10, 2015

Main Street Stores Need A Tech Upgrade

Many small towns wish they had a big box store of some kind as an answer to the retail needs of their residents. The owners of Main Street stores, of course, worry about big box stores. After all, Walmart grew into the colossus it is today by first serving the small town and rural market.

Then the growth of Amazon and other e-commerce companies just made things worse for bricks-and-mortar stores on Main Street.

Some stores have sought to survive by focusing on especially narrow niches or creative, quirky products. But this hasn’t been enough to replace all the retail business that has been lost.

Of course, local leaders and economic development officials just want to revive their main streets somehow – and making the stores their viable is part of that revival.

Meanwhile, the retail business is shifting and using space to create exciting and entertaining environments inside the store, rather than stocking up as much inventory as they can.

Stores in small towns need to jump ahead and aggressively adopt the new retail technology. There are some interesting examples of technology that could be used in these Main Street stores.

Adidas built a virtual wall which shows off all of their shoes, lets shoppers see them at all angles and purchase what they want, which can be delivered later. It amounts to a limitless inventory for a small store.

Using an approach several companies have taken, Ray Ban has a virtual mirror that will show how a pair of sunglasses looks on your face.

Similarly, there are variations of virtual mirrors that let you see how a particular item of clothing looks on you before you buy – or perhaps even before the store orders it from the manufacturer.

Since most small town stores can’t be open all the time, there’s always a way to allow shoppers to peek inside when the doors are closed.

Projectors are a relatively inexpensive way of blending the virtual and physical in stores. Sometimes they can be used to provide further information that a customer wants.

And store owners of all kinds realize that part of what draws people in is just an entertaining environment. So here’s another projection example that’s installed for pure fun.

Finally, there’s nothing to stop a retailer with unique products – like art works – from taking pictures and putting those on the Internet for customers to see, both local and potentially worldwide customers.

Indeed, the retailers in small towns should take advantage of their greater agility than the big store chain behemoths. That’s the way they will succeed and, in the process, help make Main Street more exciting to visit.

The lesson here is the same as for small towns and rural communities in general – the intelligent use of information and communications technologies can help them flourish in this century. The impact, indeed, will be much stronger and more visible than it is in big cities.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/121188673865/main-street-stores-need-a-tech-upgrade]

June 3, 2015

Has Apple Design Lost Its Way?

Jony Ive, who is credited with the design of many of Apple’s greatest products, was promoted to the position of Chief Design Officer last week. The company’s announcement seemed to say that Ive would now be bringing “design thinking” to all of the company, not just its products. Some pundits said this was a graceful way to ease him out of the picture. Others said it freed him to spend more time on the “next big thing.”

Maybe he should indeed be refocusing on product design, since for me, his promotion renewed the question as to whether Apple has lost its way in the design of tech products.

Apple can still create nice feature improvements in its products, but they seem to missing the larger aims of design. Specifically, think back to Apple’s showing of the iPad 3 in 2012. Its video introduction of that product began with these words:

“We believe technology is at its very best when it’s invisible. When you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not the device you’re doing it with.”

This is as good as it gets in describing the role of design in technology products. Yet over the last couple of years, Apple’s products have gotten mostly bigger and more obvious.

The iPhone 6 grew bigger than the iPhone 5, mostly it would seem to catch up to the competition. The iPod Nano, a useful and small device, was discontinued and replaced by a larger version.

So now, instead of seeing someone holding an Apple product like this …

people go around absurdly armed like this.

The Apple Watch is another example where Apple did anything but hide the technology. This is all the more perplexing when you look at what they could have designed, something more like the Neptune Hub that is an attempt to create an elegant new product category.

Given its small size and dependency on crowdfunding, there’s every conventional reason to question how long Neptune can last.

Given its marketing power and reputation, there’s no reason to think that the Apple Watch will not be at least a conventional, moderate business success. But, whatever success the Watch has and will have cannot mostly be attributed to design – which Apple used to claim to be among its chief differentiators.

I’m not predicting the demise of Apple, which has been heralded ever since Steve Jobs’ death. It’s very hard to drive a company, with $150 billion in the bank, to extinction any time soon. And Apple’s products are not bad at all. (I suppose that’s faint praise 😉

It may seem churlish to criticize the largest company in the world, one that seems headed toward being the first with a trillion dollar stock market valuation. But money is not the measure of all things, as the old line goes and Jobs himself inferred.

What Apple perhaps is facing is a kind of typical corporate maturity – with solid products, but a greater emphasis on sales/marketing and management processes, rather than on design and the user’s needs. It was exactly that kind of shift that Steve Jobs criticized in Robert Cringely’s Lost Interview with him. Jobs’ target was IBM and HP. But no company is immune, as he knew.

The observations that Jobs made about what it takes for both small and big companies to make great leaps are even more relevant today than twenty years ago when the video was recorded. Those of us who consume new technology can only hope that somewhere out there is another Jobs who has learned his lessons– and who will ensure newly designed products that get closer to being invisible, after all.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/120610921392/has-apple-design-lost-its-way]