“The era of holographic computing is here – When you change the way you see the world, you can change the world you see.
Microsoft envisioned a world where technology could become more personal—where it could adapt to the natural ways we communicate, learn, and create. Where our digital lives would seamlessly connect with real life.
The result is the world’s most advanced holographic computing platform, enabled by Windows 10. Microsoft HoloLens brings high-definition holograms to life in your world, where they integrate with your physical places, spaces, and things.
As holograms, your digital content will be as real as physical objects in the room. For the first time, holograms will become practical tools of daily life. It goes beyond augmented reality and virtual reality by enabling you to interact with three-dimensional holograms blended with your real world.
HoloLens is more than a simple heads-up display, and its transparency means you never lose sight of the world around you.”
Content is what we really want – Entertainment, Excitement and Education. On any screen, anytime.
The pace of change in the Advertising & Technology landscape is accelerating and new engagement techniques and formats evolve rapidly. Content and it’s fluidity should be curated to ensure it’s most wanted.
This presentation outlines my view on the latest technology trends and examples for a more digital content powered marketing paradigm.
Why Virtual Reality will compete with the Real World.
Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” in the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, as well as the first “avatars,” or representations of users within such systems.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will compete with the Real World in a Mixed Reality (MR).
The true promise of Virtual Reality: going beyond the idea of immersion and achieving true presence – the feeling of actual existing in a virtual space.
Hacking your visual cortex – your brain cannot perceive a difference between experiencing something in VR and experiencing it in the real world.
Can we build such a Space?
In a Virtual World Framework, HTML5-based?
You’ll need stereoscopic 3D, 360⁰ visuals, HD (ideally 16k) resolution, wide field of view with special optics, calibration, optical tracking, ergonomics, 95Hz frame-rate, no less than 10 milliseconds lag, geo-spatially mapped sound, a lot of sensors and high-(small-)tech.
Perception = Reality
“Our Reality is nothing more or less than the sum of conclusions reached by a variety of unconscious processors driven by a body worth’s of sensors. Our coherent view of the world emerges from the integration of the outputs of those processors in the lower levels of our brain.” – Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash
“A second kind of presence—the feeling of really being face-to-face with another person—requires an end-to-end delay (including hardware, software, and network transmission) of around 100 milliseconds or less between your movement and their perception of that movement.
You can reach out and virtually touch or shake hands with another person and find the perception of the resulting collisions and motion to be perfectly believable and immersive.”
The Magic Leap Deal via WSY
“Google and a slew of well-heeled firms are investing $542 million in Magic Leap Inc. This values the company at just under $2 billion.
Earlier this year, Google’s rival, Facebook paid $2 billion to buy Oculus Rift, a maker of a virtual-reality headset.
The two companies are using their sizable cash piles to bet on new methods of communication to ensure their place on all kinds of devices.”
“Sony recently introduced Morpheus, its own virtual reality headset for its game console.
At stake, experts say, isn’t just a new entertainment toy but a chance to define how people will interact with computers.”
“We might find ourselves asking some important questions: ‘Where are the other people?’ and ‘Where can I start working and learning and building in here?’”
Where would I go? What would I do?
While “we’re still a ways off from the neural shunts that piped cyberspace directly into the brains of Gibson characters like Johnny Mnemonic”,
“For many of the everyday things we do—talking face-to-face, working together, or designing and building things—the real world will suddenly have real competition.”
“Although the warfighters were free to leave, they asked the FITE (Future Immersive Training Environment) team to allow them to stay and fight force on force until one person was left standing, and that is exactly what they did.”
There is more to the Internet of Things (IoT) than FitBits and smartphone-controlled thermostats. While consumer goods are some of the IoT’s most visible applications, they’re just one part of the vast and game-changing phenomenon that could soon encompass 200 billion connected devices and add trillions of dollars to the economy. The global market for the “Internet of Things” is expected to grow to $7.1 trillion in 2020, up from $1.9 trillion in 2013.
In fact, experts estimate that the IoT will resonate strongly in the “invisible” industrial sector, capturing and analyzing data generated by drilling rigs, jet engines, locomotives and other heavy-duty machines. This network is called the Industrial Internet and it’s already helping companies shave costs and boost performance.
“The Evolution may look old-fashioned, it is in many respects a hurtling computer. Its array of sensors and data-collecting devices complements its bulky mass with a sleek, digital agility that will grow only more impressive and more significant with time. It is also a rolling electronic laboratory, a locomotive’s insides contain 6.7 miles of wiring and 250 sensors that put out 9 million data points every hour.
In the coming years, the number of sensors and data points will climb precipitously. In this fusion of old and new, this melding of heavy and light, you can see that the Evolution resembles its maker, General Electric, a company that manufactures huge things for huge customers and yet is reinventing itself–and, in the process, the very economics of heavy industry–by embracing a new kind of sophistication.
Two years ago, at a San Francisco conference billed as “Minds and Machines,” GE CEO Jeff Immelt took the stage to explain the company’s behemoths like the Evolution. The catchphrase he used that day, the “Industrial Internet,” has by now become commonplace in technology circles, even though it has been barely realized in terms of impact.
At times, the Industrial Internet has been lumped alongside the so-called Internet of Things, which usually describes the effort to bestow networked connectivity on, say, your home lighting or thermostat. Yet GE’s industrial effort is more ambitious than that. Immelt’s point in his speech was that GE could no longer just build big machines like locomotives and jet engines and gas turbine power plants–“big iron,” as it’s known within the company. It now had to create a kind of intelligence within the machines, which would collect and parse their data. As he saw it, the marriage of big-data analysis and industrial engineering promised a nearly unimaginable range of improvements. A new GEnx jet engine with a multitude of sensors could spin off an awesome amount of information. GE would in turn help predict, say, when a crucial engine part required repairs. GE would use data from machines like the Evolution to optimize performance to undreamed-of levels.
In trying to build smarter machines, the company is also vying to create a new industrial age that produces broad, rippling gains for the entire global economy.
GE’s Industrial Internet may seem like a single, comprehensive approach to infrastructure technology. But in truth, the Industrial Internet is made from a dizzying number of components–software as well as hardware–that will be rolled out over the course of the next decade.
“The goal is not just to take data I have today, but to go back and look at the data we have already and see if it shows we could have predicted a historical failure,” Stokes says. His team would look at the broken-down locomotive and comb through its data banks to try to discern a pattern. “We want to turn that into an algorithm that helps us predict the future,” Stokes explains. “We want to say: These three conditions, in this sequence, mean there’s a 90% chance this failure will happen.”
Machines that talk, machines that react, machines that constantly update their status–it sounds a bit like a social network… of machines.
GE, at any rate, doesn’t make its pile of money merely from selling big machines. It makes as much, or sometimes more, from servicing those machines via customer contracts, now worth some $180 billion in all, that can stretch for 20 years or more following a sale.
“The first wave was: It breaks, we fix it,” Comstock says, talking about how things worked in the 1960s and 1970s. The second wave, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, were service agreements that assured customers that a GE–built jet engine or turbine would achieve a certain level of performance and would have regularly scheduled maintenance based on GE’s experience with the wear and tear of its parts.
An approaching third wave, enabled by data and analytics, does something new. It strikes an agreement between GE and a customer for a certain kind of outcome, rather than a certain kind of functionality. It’s not only about measuring whether a jet engine is working up to its specifications, or about repairing it on time, but whether it’s delivering, say, the agreed-upon amount of peak operational time. “We’re getting to the point of selling thrust, not engines,” says Brad Surak, a software manager for the company. “Or we’re selling locomotion, not locomotives.
If another company–a Silicon Valley startup, say–figures out how to do the analytics on GE’s industrial equipment first, the industrial giant might see the lifeblood of its service business threatened. A quest to make intelligent machines.
The digital revolution we’ve witnessed in the consumer arena is at last ready to invade new territory. “I believe in this stuff more than you can imagine,” he says, “because I think all machines are going to get smart. They’re going to talk. The technology is there, but we have to get it to work in an industrial way.” What he means is that an Industrial Internet can pose a more stringent set of requirements than the consumer one. Ruh likes to say that if your cell phone drops a call, you get annoyed, but if your power goes down, you get angry, or fearful–or people in hospitals die. Therefore, reliability–a zero tolerance for platform failures–is essential in the software he builds. So too is cybersecurity.
At the launch of the Industrial Internet in 2012, he recalls that Andreessen had just written a hotly debated article for The Wall Street Journal about how software would “eat” the world. Andreessen wrote, “My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.”
The coming progression of smart technologies will lay the groundwork for a second great industrial age–a more distant future where intelligent machines can be upgraded into what the company calls “brilliant” machines. These devices wouldn’t just let you know they were going to break down. They would actually repair themselves.
“Marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most technology-dependent functions in business. In 2012 the research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that by 2017, a company’s chief marketing officer would be spending more on technology than its chief information officer was.
A new type of executive is emerging at the center of the transformation: the chief marketing technologist. CMTs are part strategist, part creative director, part technology leader, and part teacher. They have a common job:
aligning marketing technology with business goals
serving as a liaison to IT
evaluating and choosing technology providers
helping craft new digital business model
The best CMTs set a technology vision for marketing. They champion greater experimentation and more-agile management of that function’s capabilities. And they are change agents, working within the function and across the company to create competitive advantage.
This rise in digital budgets is not merely a migration of spending from traditional to digital media. A growing portion of marketing’s budget is now allocated to technology itself. A recent Gartner study found that 67% of marketing departments plan to increase their spending on technology-related activities over the next two years. In addition, 61% are increasing capital expenditures on technology, and 65% are increasing budgets for service providers that have technology-related offerings.
There are now well over 1,000 marketing software providers worldwide. CMO and the CIO must collaborate closely. Marketing technology must be managed holistically. In a virtuous cycle, what’s possible with technology should inspire what’s desirable for marketing, and vice versa.”
“Standard ad formats are essential to delivering the scale needed by national [& international] advertisers. The demands placed on digital ad standards have increased exponentially since their inception, fueled by the rapid increase in bandwidth, device proliferation, and user expectations.
The next generation of standards must work for different ad types (e.g., brand vs. direct response) in a world where content is fluid across screens, while also being flexible enough to accommodate continuous change.
The growing complexity of the digital advertising ecosystem makes ad standards more necessary today than ever before, but also raises the bar for what the standards must deliver.”
Content strategies online demand that we quit the marketing and corporate speak and start telling stories.
People don’t want to hear corporate-speak about your company, product or service, they want to hear actual stories about how your customers are doing better by doing business with you!
A hiring process called Targeted Selection
One of the keys to the interview process with a new candidate was asking open-ended questions that required the candidate to tell a story. The reason was because it was a lot easier to get people to reveal their honest answer when you asked them to describe the entire story rather than ask them a yes or no question.
Here’s an example:
Do you work well with tight deadlines? Answer: Yes
Storified… Can you tell me about a time at work where you had a number of very tight deadlines that were going to be a challenge, or perhaps impossible, to make? Answer: A story that you could ask additional details about.”
This is my private blog - any opinion expressed here does not necessarily represent the views of my previous employer, which was Microsoft Mobile Devices.
In my role there as Global VP, Consumer Engagement (Digital & Social Marketing and CEM), I was leading all things Digital and co-wrote the next chapter of Microsoft's Digital success story.
Advertising v3.0 by Chris Schaumann 