Will Samsung write you a prescription and deliver your medicine?

At CES 2016 Samsung showed a number of wellness-related products, including the WELT:

The WELT communicates with your phone to tell you how many steps you've taken, how long you've been sitting, eating habits and your waistline size. It then sends the data to a specially-designed app for analysis, to tell you things like -- if you keep eating like you did today, you're going to gain 2 pounds this month. Samsung expects the WELT to go on sale this year.

If the product becomes a commercial success, it's easy to imagine how much historical data the company is going to collect across a broad range of demographic categories. Even if this particular product flops in the market, similar ones, e.g. made by FitBit or Apple, will emerge over time. The key difference between Samsung and others is that Samsung is now getting into pharmaceuticals. Here's a quote from a 2014 Bloomberg article:

South Korea’s biggest company is investing at least $2 billion in biopharmaceuticals, including the growing segment of biosimilars, which are cheaper versions of brand-name biotechnology drugs that have lost patent protection.

“We are in an infancy still,” Christopher Hansung Ko, chief executive officer at the Samsung Bioepis unit, said in an interview. “We are a Samsung company. Our mandate is to become No. 1 in everything we enter into, so our long-term goal is to become a leading pharmaceutical company in the world.”

Remarkably, Samsung has a chance to become the only company in the world capable of gathering real-time biological data, diagnosing diseases and delivering appropriate treatments to an individual at the right time, in the right place and at the right price.

tags: innovation, samsung, health, detection, tool, mobile

The new Digital Divide

The New York Times shows how mobile app designers devise new ways to get teenagers' attention during the day,

Push notifications — those incessant reminders that make your phone light up and ding — are the infantry of app warfare, cracking the attention span to remind users that someone on the Internet might be talking about them. All summer Wishbone had been sending out alerts four times a day, but the three men were thinking about adding more and, now that students were back in class, trying to recalibrate around the school day. 

“Can we have a friends feed at noon?” Mr. Jones asked Mr. Vatere. “It would be great to do ‘Your friends have updated.’ ”

“And you talk about it while you’re at school,” Mr. Pham added.

What are the implications: not for the business and advertisers, which the NYT article discusses, but for the kids, their families and the society at large?

We already know that frequent interruptions worsen kids' learning performance. We also know that pre-teens and teens are becoming addicted to their mobiles. Given that well-funded and market-savvy mobile app developers create new ways to target kids during school hours, we can predict that there will be a learning gap between kids who can manage their mobile distractions and those who cannot.

The old Digital Divide existed between people who had online access and those who had not. The underlying assumption was that the former were better off because they had access to all the information information needed to learn effectively.

I believe the assumption is no longer valid. Having access to the internet all the time is becoming detrimental to learning. Arguably, it's worse than television because kids get bombarded with distractions and advertisement all the time, rather than during the leisure hours.

The new Digital Divide is going to emerge between those who can manage their online time and those who cannot. Online learning may even broaden this divide because it will provide the motivated with greater opportunities to excel. Most likely, we already seeing signs of things to come through the low completion rates in virtual universities — 3-5%: few get huge benefits, while the majority does not. Paradoxically, online learning has become a natural selection environment for the next generation of schoolchildren addicted to their ubiquitous social interactions.

tags: psychology, mobile, learning, virtual, media, advertisement

Predicting smartphone addiction in kids

A study of South Korean elementary school kids has found that stress and lack of self-control are the strongest predictors of the "smartphone" addiction. Although the device to deliver the addiction is the smartphone, the real hooks for the addiction are Social Networking (SNS) and entertainment services (via BBC news).

Since the mobile has become a dominant platform for delivering entertainment services, in a period of two generations we can expect a migration of television advertisement money into online services. The TV and the web are going to go into oblivion like the newsprint. We can also expect that Twitter will not catch up with Facebook or other major SNS'.

Also, it appears that the humanity is running a large-scale Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, dividing kids into those who can exert self–control and those who cannot. 

The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that "preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent."
A second follow-up study, in 1990, showed that the ability to delay gratification also correlated with higher SATscores.^[5]

From an innovation theory perspective, the smartphone represents the Dominant Design, while online services - the Dominant Use.

Facebook is taking over Google in sourcing the flow of news

Fortune runs an article showing Facebook's influence growing in the news segment:

...it’s clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and isn’t really growing any more as a referral source for media. Meanwhile, Facebook’s influence has “shown it’s on a continued growth trajectory."

Source: Forbes.com (click images to enlarge)

The competition for advertisers' money between Facebook and Google is heating up. We should expect that Facebook will make further inroads into information segments other than news. Although it's too early to pronounce Search dead, its dominance on the web no longer translates directly into the mobile space, especially, when users spend more and more time on social. (Based on system analysis, we anticipated this trend in Scalable Innovation, Chapters 20-22).

It is also somewhat surprising that Twitter is such a non-factor in the race. Despite the "freshness" of their links, they don't have enough users to play the game. Furthermore, unlike the Facebook's, Twitter connections don't have the strength of social relations.

tags: mobile, information, control, google, facebook, twitter, system

Trade-off of the Day: Smartness vs Ease of Use

Steve Jobs shows how Apple broke the trade-off with the iPhone.



tags: trade-off, dilemma, interface, mobile, software, apple

Smartphone: the greatest personal device ever?

According to Gallup, more and more people can't imagine their life without their smartphone:

The device has become our ultimate interface into the world of social interactions and productivity. It's hard to find in the history of technology a device that is more personal than that. Adding more devices to one's personal network is likely to increase our dependance on the smartphone.

tags: invention, innovation, mobile, interface, social, biology, networking, psychology

Facebook patents video messaging (again!) US 9,071,725

Facebook continues to mine successfully the AOL patent portfolio the company acquired from Microsoft. On June 30, 2015 the United States Patent Office issued US 9,071,725 titled "Methods and user interfaces for video messaging."

The patent dates back to U.S. provisional application No. 60/220,648, filed Jul. 25, 2000. (15 years in prosecution!). The application has already resulted in two good patents – US 8,087,678 and US 7,984,098. The new Facebook claims cover a concurrent video and text interactions between two computing devices, including mobiles (See claim 7).

This is a broad, strong patent that possibly reads on many existing video systems, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc.

tags: patent, facebook, mobile, video, social, networking

The myopia epidemic among children, continued

Several years ago, I blogged about the myopia epidemic among children. The problem was caused by an increase in the time kids spent staring at their computer screens instead of playing outdoors. The change impacted their peripheral vision and, eventually, resulted in myopia.

I wonder whether the mobile revolution has increased myopia rates further. There several factors that point to it. First, compared with computer screens, smartphones and tablets are even smaller; therefore, they require less peripheral vision. Second, children carry their phones everywhere, increasing the overall screen time. Third, the new touchscreen interface, mobile apps and games make it easier for younger children to use phones and tablets. As a result, they start using technology at an earlier age, which should have a greater impact on their vision over time.

Based on the latest technology developments, we can easily predict that 3D virtual reality devices will also increase our collective screen time. Although it's a speculation on my part, I believe we should start looking for ways to solve the problem before it gets completely out of hand.

tags: health, trend, mobile, innovation, trade-off

Lunch Talk: Inventions of the 1990s

A Discovery Channel episode about major inventions of the 1900s.




Featured inventions: Hubble Space Telescope, Wind Up Radio, Camera Phone, Mars Pathfinder, The Neurotrophic Electrode.

The Web is Dead - mobile edition.

The hyperlink (or URL) is one of the greatest inventions of the web era. It is excellent for linking pages, navigating between sites, downloading content, etc. Unfortunately, the URL is largely useless on mobile devices because it doesn't work outside the browser. To solve the problem, mobile technology companies develop alternatives that allow launching one app from another. MIT Tech Review reports that,

Today mobile apps increasingly rule our free time and require us to dive into separate, walled-off digital containers that don’t link up.

The new kind of hyperlink could make apps seem less walled off from one another. Deep linking, as the technology is called, is also seen as a way to open up new forms of advertising that will provide revenue to make mobile advertising more closely match its online counterpart (see “Why No One Likes Mobile Ads”).

Once a suitable replacement for the URL is found, the decline of the web will become inevitable. Here's a cheesy Facebook video that explains the concept:




tags: web, technology, evolution, aboutness, mobile, application

Smartphone apps: mobile and insecure.

MIT Technology review writes:

A 2012 study of 13,500 Android apps by researchers in Germany found that only 0.8 percent used encrypted connections exclusively, and that 43 percent use no encryption at all. Last week mobile app security company MetaIntell reported that 92 percent of the 500 most popular Android applications communicated some data insecurely.

To move into the enterprise on scale, mobile devices and apps have to become secure. The same goes for mobile payments and NFC-based apps. Enhanced security requirements will demand more computing power, which many companies would not able to afford. As a result, secure cloud-based services will have an opportunity for long-term growth. Although before that, NSA surveylance issues have to be resolved, so that customers feel comfortable with having their vital data hosted externally.

tags: mobile, security, packaged, payload, control, business, enterprise

Facebook patents secure upgrade of a wireless mobile device.

Facebook got a nice patent (US 8,631,239) that covers a secure software upgrade of a wireless mobile device. According to the specification, the system uses a public key to authenticate the software delivered over the air (OTA).

Wireless connections are notoriously unsafe and prone to hacker interception. The Facebook solution enables a service provider to perform a reliable upgrade over an unreliable channel. It's highly likely that in the future most software upgrades, especially in the enterprise environment, will be done using this approach - simple and powerful!

Unfortunately,  the patent itself has an important flaw: it does not define the term "endpoint", which figures prominently in claim 1. Moreover, in Fig 1B it uses a different term "System Front End (120)."

As I noted several times before, the company's quality control over their patenting process seems to be spotty, at best. A simple document search would allow them to spot and fix the definition problem.

1. A method comprising, by one or more computing systems: executing software from a first partition of system memory; requesting an over-the-air (OTA) software update from an endpoint; receiving a manifest for the OTA update; downloading a payload pursuant to the manifest; installing the payload into a second partition of system memory; and rebooting, pursuant to the manifest, to the second partition of system memory, wherein rebooting to the second partition of system memory comprises authenticating a bootloader signature with a bootloader public key.

Brief system analysis: the manifest represents the "Aboutness"; encrypted software update - Packaged Payload; device  - Tool; a process that runs on the device to verify authenticity - Control; endpoint - Source; over-the-air channel - Distribution. Overall, it's a textbook example of system composition (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 2). To solve the problem, the inventors use Separation in Space - one of the key TRIZ principles.

Model-wise, it is quite similar to my patent US 7,529,806. They have a different payload, but the aboutness is managed and created for the same purpose. I should use the Facebook patent as a system analysis homework assignment in BUS 74 this summer.

In view of the Nortel patent and invention principles listed above, the Facebook patent can be attacked as "obvious."

tags: patent, invention, innovation, security, mobile, enterprise, system, model, aboutness

Sisyphus 2.0: predicting the future is easy.

Despite all the technological change, our daily lives are quite similar to that of Sisyphus, a character from an ancient Greek myth. As a punishment, the gods condemned him to" roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever."

A research paper from Microsoft shows that а modern person's future is highly predictable:

It turns out that no matter how spontaneous we think we are, humans are actually quite predictable in our movements, even over extended periods of time. Not only did Far Out predict with high accuracy the correct location of a wide variety of individuals, but it did so even years into the future.

The researchers note that frequently visited locations can be further linked to people's actions. One could reasonably guess that people who happen to be at the same location do similar things. As a result, knowing what one person does on a regular basis helps predict what other people do on a regular basis. Quite likely, companies like Google, with access to lots of user data, will soon be able to predict (among other things) a country's economic activity better than the government statistics.


tags:  process, creativity, prediction, mobile, aboutness

e-mail is a security black hole.

(NYT. Jan 31, 2013) SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. 

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom.

Over the course of three months, attackers installed 45 pieces of custom malware. The Times — which uses antivirus products made by Symantec — found only one instance in which Symantec identified an attacker’s software as malicious and quarantined it, according to Mandiant.

E-mail is a mature technology where bugs and security holes were all supposed to be extinguished. If e-mail servers at a major news institution cannot be protected from outside intruders, the situation with thousands of mobile apps is probably much worse.
The effectiveness of anti-virus software is quite pathetic - 44 our 45 malware pieces not detected.

tags: security, internet, control, mobile, communications

The Web is Dead, a social media edition.

(San Francisco. Jan 30, 2012) Facebook Inc. said its mobile daily active users exceeded its desktop daily active users for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The trend hasn't touched the enterprise world that much yet - a huge technology opportunity.

P.S. VentureBeat and Yahoo Mail web pages are the worst browser hogs ever. The pages contain sloppy scripts and flash widgets that pull data constantly, even when the the page is not visible in the tab view.

tags: s-curve, internet, web, mobile, social, networking

The Creative (self-)Destruction of Nokia.

(WSJ. July 18, 2012). More than seven years before Apple Inc. AAPL -0.08% rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen—all features today of the hot-selling Apple iPad.

"Oh my God," Mr. Nuovo says as he clicks through his old slides. "We had it completely nailed."
Consumers never saw either device. The gadgets were casualties of a corporate culture that lavished funds on research but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.

People tend to forget that the iPhone, with its beautiful design, was just a part of a new system Steve Jobs and his team at Apple put together with help from Google, ATT, Hollywood, Samsung, and the app development community. Furthermore, to succeed in the early stages (Synthesis), an innovation doesn't have to be perfect,

Nokia engineers' "tear-down" reports, according to people who saw them, emphasized that the iPhone was expensive to manufacture and only worked on second-generation networks—primitive compared with Nokia's 3G technology. One report noted that the iPhone didn't come close to passing Nokia's rigorous "drop test," in which a phone is dropped five feet onto concrete from a variety of angles. 

Not surprisingly, Nokia's patent portfolio is worth more than its business operations.

tags: mobile, system, synthesis, s-curve, evolution

Predicting people's future locations with mobile data.

MIT Tech Review reports on an algorithm that allows mobile tracking systems to predict our future locations:

Beyond merely tracking where you've been and where you are, your smartphone might soon actually know where you are going—in part by recording what your friends do.

Researchers in the U.K. have come up with an algorithm that follows your own mobility patterns and adjusts for anomalies by factoring in the patterns of people in your social group (defined as people who are mutual contacts on each other's smartphones).

The method is remarkably accurate. In a study on 200 people willing to be tracked, the system was, on average, less than 20 meters off when it predicted where any given person would be 24 hours later. The average error was 1,000 meters when the same system tried to predict a person's direction using only that person's past movements and not also those of his friends, says Mirco Musolesi, a computer scientist at the University of Birmingham who led the study.

 From a philosophical point of view, in a dense social network one's freedom of the will seems to be quite limited.

tags: social, networking, mobile, detection, control, aboutness

The killer device.

For the first time, web traffic from Apple's mobile devices exceeded that of Macs. One revolution Steve Jobs started thirty years ago is coming to an end. The other one is just getting under way.

Feb 10, 2012. VBeat -- In the first quarter of 2012, for instance, Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and just 5.2 million Macs.

It’s not quite the death of the desktop, but mobile devices are gaining ground on their traditional brethren, at least within the Apple-centric world.

“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe that there’s much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad,” Cook said

tags: mobile, s-curve, web, tool, information, synthesis

Smartphones reincarnated.

Mass production of smartphone components creates opportunities for new embedded applications based on smartphone software and hardware. For example, Romo the robot.

Feb 4, 2012. CNet -- They wanted to build a robot that, like any software-based product, could be tweaked and changed over time. Their robot needed to evolve.
The problem was cost. Nguyen, who is 25, came up with the idea of tying it all to a smartphone in order to take advantage of the powerful processor already built into the phone. This way, the most expensive part of building a robot from scratch would, in effect, be taken care of by Apple or other smartphone makers

Now we know that in the future old phones will be reincarnated as robots or some other type of computing interface for various appliances.
The PC revolution created huge opportunities for embedded computing: from dental office equipment to PC-based supermarket checkout stands to blade servers that run on Intel processors. In a similar fashion, the smartphone revolution will power new connected appliances.

tags: computing, mobile, innovation, s-curve, 4q diagram

The market side of breakthrough technology and business model.

The latest numbers from Asymco show that Apple, with 9% global share of physical mobile phones, has 75% of industry profits. All other manufacturers are fighting each other, supplying the market with commodity devices and services.

For more detail, see CNET.

Simply put, the iPhone ecosystem has no substitutes.

tags: mobile, innovation, apple, breakthrough, niche construction