The Internet Of Insertion

This Goes Inside A Cow; Ouch

On my Twitter feed (you aren't signed up for my Twitter feed? It's @davidlmountain, please, feel free) over the holiday, I noted how one of the things to be thankful for is that, in this lifetime, you aren't a dairy cow. (Yes, I'm presuming and yes, marketing and advertising is on the way. Patience.)

Another thing to be thankful for: that you aren't a dairy cow 130 miles northwest of London, where, if Bloomberg.com is to be believed,cows get Internet of Things transmitters placed inside the first of their four stomachs, so that they can be remote monitored for illness, going into heat, and so forth.

The weighted sensor is said to be about the size of a hot dog, and will last about four years, which is about as long as a dairy cow is productive. Given the expense of such animals, and the amount of product that a farmer can expect to receive from a healthy animal, as opposed to an ill one, it's a clear win for the farmers, and the animals don't have a say in the matter. But it also lends itself to a clear if this, then what thought exercise.

My dog, and maybe yours as well, has a microchip in his leg. It's about the size of a grain of rice, and he got it when he was a puppy. It causes him no pain, and he's in no way aware of it. It's there on the off chance that he ever gets lost and found by a professional with the right technology. My children, and maybe yours as well, have phones that can easily give the location in the event of crisis. My car, and maybe yours as well, has a transmitter on the windshield to allow for toll collection at speed, and the newer model that my wife drives has much more than that. All of that can be used to track our movements. Oh, and the vast majority of our purchases comes through digital technology, which is to say, easily trackable movements. My credit card, and maybe yours as well, rewards me to use it, and carrying a great deal of cash isn't just unseemly, it's dangerous.

Much of this is so commonplace now as to be barely worth mentioning, and yet they all add up to an ever-thickening web of connectivity, which only seems noteworthy when it's, well, new. Or invasive.

Now, we'll add another moment of technology, which is the introduction of a supercapacitor that can be charged by human body heat. This may seem like a development that doesn't have immediate consumer utility, but that would be wrong. Just imagine, for instance, a mobile phone that you just need to hold to recharge. Useful, right? So much so that it may be ubiquitous within a decade.

Where does all of this go next? Well, for my money, we're going to see real movement in wearable health monitoring technology, especially once the battery charge is more or less an afterthought from body heat. It's one thing to know how many steps you've taken, or your standing heart rate. It's quite another to know when someone with a chronic condition is at risk for any number of factors, or for someone who is post-surgery to be able to recuperate, safely, at home. No one wants to lose a loved one for any reason, let alone something that technology could easily prevent. Becoming a bio-mechanical hybrid also seems, well, off-putting. But probably less than being at risk. (Also, it leads to revolutionary possibilities in targeting, ad effectiveness, and so on. See, this all comes back to how we pay the bills.)

The question comes to this: where will the push/pull of utility versus discomfort, privacy versus health, security versus expense, fall?

Because, well, I love my dog. That's why I had him chipped.

And I don't love my kids any less...

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The Future Of Delivery?

Fly-By Dinner

When I was a child, the Metric system wasn't just a logical unit of measurement. It was absolutely assumed to be the way the U.S. was going to go. There were any number of classes where teachers seemed incredulous that they still had to even give short shrift to English measurements. And yet, decades later, they are still, well, everywhere. Miles, gallons, feet, yards, Fahrenheit... all still out there for you. And no one, seemingly, is ready to predict when they will go away.

Fast forward to adolescence. My first start-up looked to take advantage of a newly dominant communications medium, one that had massive installation in business locations and world-wide use. We even changed the name of the company to match this exciting tech, in the hopes that it would make us more attractive for future partners. And that's how a small group of investors lost a larger amount of money on U.S. Fax.

The point is that all tech, no matter how sexy or inevitable it might seem when it's on the rise, has a very hard threshold to break to achieve dominance and true market changes. For every social media channel that seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, many have gone by the wayside. Even if something seems logical and inevitable, if the benefits to the average user are not enough to make the bargain work, the market (or at least, in the case of the metric system in America, the U.S. market) will reject it.

Which brings me to an event that happened in a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand this last week. A pizza chain (no need to say which, honestly) completed a delivery by drone. Food was winched up and flown to the customer's house, lowered and released, with the drone then returning to port. One assumes the transaction was covered online, so there's no need for the drone to collect funds.

The advantages are obvious. Drones would use a fraction of the fuel of the technology (humans driving cars) that they would displace. Instead of propelling a ton or more of car, the drone is pushing about 50 pounds or so. The positive environmental impact is intense, not just for the gasoline, but also the wear and tear on roads, and the presumably lower fatalities, since a drone accident is much less likely to result in human injury then, well, an automobile accident. Multiply these savings enough times, independent of the costs of labor, and there's clear market movement. Given the lack of delay from traffic, deliveries may be faster, and consumers may choose to patronize this option more, since you never have to deal with a tip, or possible awkwardness with the driver.

And yet, I can also see strong reasons why drones may not succeed, outside of a niche option in isolated markets. In the footage that I saw, the food was delivered in a box, instead of the usual thermal sleeve. Even if the box doesn't take very long to get to you, there are temperature issues from being high in the air and exposed, and rain or wind could also be a major issue. Add in the difficulties involved with high density living areas, and the starting friction with having to buy a bunch of drones and figure out how to use them, and it's safe to say that delivery drivers might keep their jobs for a very long time. Maybe even to the point of automated cars, and maybe even permanently, because it's not as if you can argue with the drone if the order is wrong.

There's also this: it's easy to imagine how drone tech would be outlawed, or made so expensive as to be impossible to use. All it would take is mayhem from terrorists that use the tech, and a public reaction that more or less makes the technology publicly untenable. Or highly regulated, or with excessive insurance costs.

Hard thing, predicting the future.

Harder still, keeping people employed during it.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Regression to the (very) mean

Stuck in the middle with you

Like many of you, I suspect, I've been struggling to move past the election results and determine what it all means. I also have the added benefit of being a professional with ample contacts in affected minority communities, and these folks are understandably concerned with the business and working environment in the U.S. now. Without getting too far into the weeds of partisanship, I'd like to bring my viewpoint as a data analyst, and student of American history, to provide some perspective.

My first love as a numbers guy was baseball statistics, and I'm still fairly current with modern thinking about the sport. Just this last week, I read a study of players with exceptional swings away from the mean; pitchers who were most likely to get fly ball or ground ball outs, and so on. The vast majority of these outlier players regress to the mean the next season, even though their particular style and ways to work makes them likely to, well, continue to produce similar results. And yet, the setting of baseball, and more data, corrects and mediates. Outliers, to a very high percentage, come back to the fold.

I'll pivot now to U.S. political history. After the end of the Civil War, nearly 2,000 African Amercians held public office in the South, from local levels to the U.S. Senate, in a period that came to be known as Radical Reconstruction. This did not last, of course; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the corruption of local law enforcement, led to a backlash and subjugation. Eventually, the pendulum swung back through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with moments like bussing, a growing tolerance for mixed marriages, and the election of Barack Obama all moving the cause further. You could make the argument that the revocation of the Voting Rights Act, and the election of Donald Trump, as more points to a backlash, and I'm certainly not inclined to disagree with you. But the greater point is that progress is rarely, if ever, a smooth line.

Finally, to my day job in email analytics. One of my favorite statistics to look at is unsubscribe, in that many providers fail to give it strong consideration, due to its relatively low incidence rate, and it's also-ran status against more impactful pieces like open, click and conversion. However, I've always seen unsub as a moment of high importance, since the user has to not just open the message, but hunt for the link and take direct action. Rarely do you get such clear indication of user preference.

This year, we've been able to make some design and coding moves in our better performing templates which have managed to cut our unsub rates, especially in mobile deployment. The effect has been to lower the likelihood that you unsubscribe in error, and for much of 2016, this systematic change has led to lower rates. That sort of thing seems like it would be a longstanding and happy development, but remember... regression to the mean.

I'd love to be wrong about this, but I'd put long odds on this happy trend continuing in the next eight weeks, and probably in the long run as well. The reason why is that we're moving into the heaviest part of the year for email usage, and in high send times, "good" emails (my firm sends marketing messages that also double as de facto education pieces) hit the in-box along with a surge of, well, everything else.

At some point, people start unsubscribing, even to pieces that they are interested in and getting beneifts from, just to get back some control of their inbox. When that happens, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. In addition, the year over year trend in email is for double-digit increases in the amount of time spent. That's a trend that just can't continue, because people are busy and not getting enough benefit to just keep increasing that time spend... and trends that can't continue, well, don't.

Regression to the mean is like gravity. You can escape it for a while, and there are great benefits from doing so. When you do it, it feels wonderful, and can seem like the new normal. But if you assume you are going to continue to do it, especially without effort, you are likely to catch a painful surprise. Perhaps, very painful.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Company You Keep

Bad Company might have better songs

This week, I met up with a friend that I haven't seen for decades, when we were just kids, honestly. He's new to my area, needs to step up his network, and we had one of those 90-minute meals where the conversation never lagged. I left feeling completely energized, and followed up with some leads that hopefully helped him on his journey. With luck, we'll meet up again soon and do more. 

Which reminded me of, well, just how the people in my childhood brought me along in their wake, and how one of the shortest ways out of any personal funk is to think about how much I have to be grateful for. I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and it wasn't easy; no funds (truth be told, my grades and test scores weren't strong enough), not much aid, and I had my heart set on a name brand, private, and pretty expensive school. It all worked out after many years of paying off debt, but the point that I want to make is that no one makes their way alone. Even once I got out of school, that same pattern of being brought along from the inertia of others reasserted itself at various stops in my career. 

So I know a lot of things about a lot of things, and it's mostly because of people I've had the honor of working with. I've said this enough times that it sounds like a canned laugh line in conversations with clients, but because of the actions and support of others, I've been able to seem smarter than I am. I've also been blessed with a memory, and the ability to focus on individual salient points. Which leads to the ability to tell a good story or two. So with luck, I've started to (hopefully) pay back what I've learned.

The point of this isn't to just tell you about myself. More so, it's to share with you how this came to be. Because the people that I've learned from are all over the map, demographically. That's not a coincidence. Your thinking, and your opportunity to think different things, just gets sharper and better if your peer group is diverse. Rather than getting stuck in the same patterns and tactics, you get outside of your comfort zone faster, hear different perspectives, and in general, just go to different mental places. 

Also, you wind up eating better, listening to more interesting music, seeing different movies, thinking different thoughts. It's harder to be bored, harder to get down on yourself, and just a better way to be. And once you find this kind of peer group, you don't give it up.

So this is where I pivot, perhaps obviously, to the election that's going to happen in a couple of days. One side has diverse support; the other does not. One side has endorsements, whether pursued or not, from expressly racist organizations; the other does not. One side has a higher percentage of supporters who are positively voting for their candidate, rather than simply against the other. One side spends much of their political advertising just simply repeating wildly inappropriate and divisive statements made by the other candidate, in the simplest "attack" ads in recent memory. One side relies on statements that are simply and easily shown to be not true, to a much greater percentage. 

This isn't a matter of getting to simply vote for the side that you normally vote for, or the one that's closer to your history. It's also, due to the clearly perverse nature of for-profit "news", a situation where we may never have a not-close, third party "safe" election ever again. 

That's why the polling for this election doesn't show the usual splits by income, but more pronounced by education level. This isn't a matter of insidious indoctrination into a political belief system; it's simple exposure to a diverse community. (The same thing applies to how one side does well in cities, where a mix is inevitable, as opposed to less dense areas.)

I'm not sure what happens next in our very broken system. This election has been an ordeal for seemingly all involved, and the only true bi-partisan point is that these take too long, cost too much, and just infuriate. But I do know that when you judge the sides by the company they keep, the choice seems obvious. So, choose accordingly.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.