Outside Innovation

No More Unlawful Search of Mobile Phones in U.S.?

June 25, 2014 was historic for mobile phone users in the U.S. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the case Riley vs. California, that police may not search the “contents” of a cell phone of an arrested suspect without a search warrant. The ruling points out that a cell phone isn’t like a cigarette pack or a piece of paper found in an arrestee’s pocket. Nor is it akin to a glove compartment within easy reach of the driver of a car who has been arrested. The syllabus (headnote) of the decision states:

“Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be carried on an arrestee’s person. Notably, modern cell phones have an immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and generally constituted only a narrow intrusion on privacy. But cell phones can store millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures, or hundreds of videos. This has several interrelated privacy consequences. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second, the phone’s capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible. Third, data on the phone can date back for years. In addition, an element of pervasiveness characterizes cell phones but not physical records. A decade ago officers might have occasionally stumbled across a highly personal item such as a diary, but today many of the more than 90% of American adults who own cell phones keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives.

Contemplating Amazon’s Fire Phone

I haven’t gotten my hands on the new Amazon Fire Phone yet, so I can’t really comment on its most dramatic feature: what Jeff Bezos refers to as “Dynamic Perspective” – the 3D effect of its unique user interface. But, without the benefit of first hand experience, I tend to agree with Sean Madden of Wired, whose excellent post, “Amazon’s Fire Phone May Be Too Magical for Its Own Good,” talks about the trade-off between magical and practical UI features. Sean points out that, while “magical” works for seldom-used features, it becomes annoying when applied to things you need to do all the time.

“The ideal balance is one that Apple, Samsung, and Google have all zeroed in on after much trial and error: confine the “magic” to occasional interactions and celebrated results, and get the obstacles out of the way for frequently used ones with clear goals.”

~ Sean Madden, Executive Managing Director of Client Experience at Ziba Design

Here’s Sean’s sketch of why the lower left quadrant works best for frequent and practical actions:

 

Amazon’s New Fire Phone’s Mayday Service Will Raise the Bar for ALL Customer Service

What’s the biggest differentiator for Amazon’s new Fire Smartphone? It’s not the 3D “we know where you’re looking” user interface, IMHO. It’s the tight integration of Amazon’s Mayday instant chat with someone who can help you do things on your phone 24x7. How many times have you tried to do something on your mobile phone and given up in frustration? It may have to do with accessing the carrier’s services (my voicemail is suddenly full of old messages), or understanding how to use a feature of the phone itself (how do I look up someone’s contact info while I’m talking to someone else on the phone?), or concerns about privacy (if I leave location awareness on, who sees that information, and is it stored somewhere?), or help using an app (how do I clip an FT article from the FT app using Evernote?). According to Darrell Etherington of Tech Crunch,

“The Mayday service offers one-tap access to customer service agents who can talk to phone users via video chat, and take over the screen on their devices to show them exactly how to do something, complete with annotations. The service is available 24 hours, and service representatives will respond to requests within 15 seconds, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said on stage.”

Amazon’s Faux Pas Comes at a Bad Time

This week Amazon announced Amazon Prime Music—1 million songs/tracks available for free for Amazon Prime users. The company also announced more seamless integration between listening and reading to e-books. You can be reading on one device, hop in your car and listen on your phone, picking up where you left off. Pretty nifty.

Amazon is also poised to announce new capabilities and broader reach for its e-payment system—a move we foreshadowed in October 2013 in my article: Why “Pay with Amazon” Is a Big Deal.

This is all part of the run up to the expected release of an Amazon smartphone/music device/e-reader/shopping buddy as early as next week.

The one problem with all this upbeat activity surrounding the Amazon brand is the lingering bad taste left in our mouths from the public airing of Amazon’s contractual disagreements with publisher Hachette. Because the two companies apparently couldn’t come to terms on Amazon’s profit margin or the selling prices for Hachette’s e-books, Amazon retaliated by slowing deliveries of Hachette’s (and other publishers’) hardcover books. This cost Hachette sales, angered authors, and frustrated customers who were waiting for their new best sellers. While we understand that companies often have differences over margins and rights, it was not smart of Amazon to publicly punish Hachette by slowing sales of its books. Customers found out about this bullying tactic, and began to react by pasting these “I didn’t buy this at Amazon” stickers on their books. Amazon’s customer-friendly brand has been tarnished.

When you are about to announce a blockbuster product, you really don’t want your customers and your suppliers annoyed at you. What was Jeff Bezos thinking?

Will Customers Regain Control Over Their Lives?

By Patty Seybold

I began thinking last week about all the ways in which the world seems to be spiraling out of our control. No matter how “together” or successful people are, we all seem to be deeply troubled by a number of seemingly inexorable trends that leave us all feeling quite powerless. The fact that a 700-page economics book rocketed to #1 on the bestseller list is a great indication that many people feel that something has gone profoundly wrong. Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21^st Century, brilliantly articulates why income inequality is so great, why the gap is widening and why it is unsustainable. I have been delighted by the airtime and buzz this book and this author have received. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and, it now appears, it’s one that has been troubling a lot of us.

The popular uptake of Piketty’s book is just one of many signs that lead me to believe we are on the cusp of another big shift in the power structures that are in play in many of our fundamental systems. Another indicator is the unsustainable amount of total debt that we are carrying as a society. Not just our national debt, nor our personal debt, but the total debt per capita—if you add it all up: national, corporate, municipal, personal, etc. In the U.S., the total debt we’re currently carrying comes out to $600,000 for a family of four. That’s $150,000 for every man, woman, and child. It’s unsustainable. We can’t get the economy going again by lending more money to consumers or businesses. We need to forgive a lot of this debt to get back to productivity. (This is all explained, quite well in my husband, Tom Hagan’s blog post, entitled “How Much Crop Can a Sharecropper Share?”)

So, as I thought about the structures of the systems that dominate our living conditions, I realized one basic truth: none of them place the needs of customers/users/citizens/patients at the center (or at the top). The ecosystems that are the most broken are the ones in which some other major players are calling the shots and the customers are being ignored. That imbalance won’t last forever. We’ve been through revolutions before. The last “customer revolution” occurred in the early 2000’s, precipitated by the Internet and the Web. We’re due for another one!

The Customer Revolution Is Coming Back!
Customers Are on the Cusp of Retaking Control Over the Big Things that Impact Their Lives
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, June 13, 2014

 

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