Link: The Ultimate Interface: Your Brain | Ramez Naam

The final frontier of digital technology is integrating into your own brain. DARPA wants to go there. Scientists want to go there. Entrepreneurs want to go there. And increasingly, it looks like it’s possible.
You’ve probably read bits and pieces about brain implants and prostheses. Let me give you the big picture.
Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all 5 senses (or more); augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy — sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others.

Source: The Ultimate Interface: Your Brain | Ramez Naam

 

Photo by YIFEI CHEN on Unsplash

The Icy Mountains of Pluto | NASA

Congratulations to NASA on the success of the New Horizons’ Mission!

Pluto

New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago — mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system — and may still be in the process of building, says Jeff Moore of New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI).

That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.

Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene. Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered — unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.

“This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” says Moore.

Source: The Icy Mountains of Pluto | NASA

A decent list of UX questions for a unified customer experience

I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘Omni-channel,’ but the core concepts in the post below is valid – the burden of figuring out the mode of interaction shouldn’t fall on customers.  Companies must craft a user experience that provides for the highest quality interactions, at every touchpoint:

But an omni-channel experience isn’t just about having multiple channels: it’s about making sure those channels all work together. The idea behind omni-channel is that it all the service channels are connected, integrated, and consistent. When customers call your company, they don’t view your support channels separately; to them, everything is managed as a whole, not a bunch of different departments. And they’re not wrong to view the customer experience this way—91% of customers want to pick up where they left off when they switch between channels.

Source: Are You Ready to Give Your Customers an Omni-Channel Experience? | UX Magazine

Why email sucks 

We may despise our inboxes (and 99% of what’s in them), but we’re neurochemically compelled to make sure that there isn’t something potentially important or pleasurable lurking in there this time. And then five minutes from now. And then again. And again. “The internal stimulus is the one that gets you,” Rosen says. “On balance, [email is] maybe 10% pleasure and 90% fear of missing out.”

Source: How email became the most reviled communication experience ever via Engadget

The internet remembers too much…

Excellent talk (transcript) by Maciej Ceglowski. This is just a brief extract:

I’ve come to believe that a lot of what’s wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.

via The Internet With A Human Face – Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk.

Read the whole thing.

♦ Marketing to a digital butler: Customer engagement in a VRM empowered world

In my previous post, I referenced Paul Greenberg’s brain dump of technologies, concepts, and theories that are pulling the CRM community toward a larger market of customer engagement.  CRM innovation is shifting from delivery of technology [footnote] By that I mean taking decade old CRM technology from on-premises to the cloud, with little customer oriented innovation. [/footnote], to building intelligent, behavior oriented systems for complex customer interactions.  With a core concept of customer engagement, companies are looking to build ‘shared value’ with their customers.  For shared value to be created, however, the equation requires reciprocating engagement from customers.  An underlying assumption of shared value creation is that customers will eagerly, and directly, engage.  What if customers incorporate their own technology layer as a buffer to all of this engagement activity?  What if the customer has a digital butler, a VRM layer [footnote] background on VRM [/footnote], to filter out the noise?

Marketers, and marketing technologists, will likely be on the vanguard of understanding how this will impact brands.  Toby Gunton, of OMD UK, writing for The Guardian:

[The movie “Her”] suggests a world where an automated guardian manages our lives, taking away the awkward detail; the boring tasks of daily existence, leaving us with the bits we enjoy, or where we make a contribution. In this world our virtual assistants would quite naturally act as barriers between us and some brands and services.

Great swathes of brand relationships could become automated. Your energy bills and contracts, water, gas, car insurance, home insurance, bank, pension, life assurance, supermarket, home maintenance, transport solutions, IT and entertainment packages; all of these relationships could be managed by your beautiful personal OS.

Brands in these categories could find themselves dealing with the digital butler (unless we, the consumer, step in and press the override button), in which case marketing in these sectors could become programmatic in the truest sense.

It’s entirely possible that the influence of our virtual minders could reach far further. What if we tell our OS that we’ll only ever buy products that meet certain ethical standards; hit certain carbon emission targets or treat their employees in a certain way? Our computer may say no to brands for many different reasons. [footnote] via Computer says no – why brands might end up marketing to algorithms | Guardian Professional. [/footnote]

 

To summarize, Gunton’s piece reflects a future where algorithms market to algorithms.  The implications for CRM technologies, and their buyers, are significant.  We are already seeing a glimpse of this future with enhancements to Google’s Gmail.

Last year, Gmail added a ‘Promotions’ tab, a feature that effectively redirects mass marketing emails out of the customer’s view [footnote] Businessweek article on how the Promotions tab might affect email marketing [/footnote], programmatically reducing  the noise that Gmail users see.  I haven’t read specifics, but reflecting on my own experience, I’ve seen roughly 60% of my email routed away from my direct attention since I activated the promotions tab.  While this is not exactly Her [footnote] or an intelligent Siri or Cortana [/footnote],  parts of that VRM future have already arrived [footnote] “The future is already here, it’s just not every evenly distributed”  – William Gibson link [/footnote].  As this future is more evenly distributed,  engagement will require different models of engaging.  A more sophisticated digital butler can be seen in the Glome project [footnote] Hat-tip to Sean Bohan for reminding me of Glome [/footnote].

Creating genuine shared value will require meaningful rethinking of what customer engagement means, and, at the same time, require a significant rearchitecting of siloed CRM interests [footnote] Traditional CRM = Salesforce Automation, Marketing Automation, Service Automation [/footnote].  Successfully building technology for the Customer Engagement market will also necessitate a radical shift in how this technology is sold and delivered.  We’re in the early stages of this tectonic shift, but there is no doubt that change is coming.  Like I said in the previous post, the next eighteen months or so will be an interesting time for all the players in the CRM world.