20 January 2005

Innovation in the gym: exercising and playing

Health warnings abound in the media that more and more children are overweight and don't exercise enough. To encourage children to become regulars of its Lifestyles fitness centres, at the end of 2004 Liverpool City Council (via Digital-Lifestyles.info) installed treadmills, rowing machines and cycles with games consoles. The innovation has been well received by both parents and children and children usage has increased 15% over the same period a year earlier.

Keen children are given an introduction session which runs between 4 - 5:30 daily and are then free to choose from a selection of 30 games supplied by the venue. Hurst (Operations manager of sport and recreation service) said they've made the decision to currently not let the children bring in their own games, so they have some control over the type of game being played. Once the game has been selected it has to be setup by the fitness instructor.

10 January 2005

Kodak come-back: a case of user centered strategy

In Kodak updates its brownie to compete in a digital age ($) (NYT, 27th December 2004), Saul Hansell tells the story of how Kodak, who was the first to manufacture a digital camera - Apple's QuickTake 100 in 1994 - grew from a market share of 5% of the US digital camera market in 2000, to a market share of 19% in 2004, closely behind market leader Sony.

Part of the reorganisation of the digital camera product line involved strategic decisions informed by in-depth customer behaviour research.

Kodak called in anthropologists and other social scientists, who observed camera users in an effort to learn how taking and printing pictures fit into their daily lives. They also followed prospective camera buyers into stores to understand how they chose certain models from the crowded shelves.

The company's big decision was to focus on low-priced, easy-to-use cameras that would appeal to women, who take the majority of snapshots, rather than Sony's forte - shiny toys for gadget-loving men.

Kodak's engineers developed a system meant to streamline the process of moving pictures off the camera, onto a computer and then either a printer, Kodak's Ofoto online printing service or e-mail. This involved new cameras, new software and an optional dock that cradled the camera, allowing it to recharge its batteries and transfer pictures to the computer at the same time.

21 December 2004

Firefox Adoption 1.5 - five days after the NYT ad

I keep an eye on the Spreadfirefox download counter. And five days after the New York Times two-page ad, it indicates 12.1 M downloads. This corresponds to over 1 M more Firefox downloads or an average of about 200,000 downloads per day with a high pick of  about 320,000 downloads between Sunday the 19th and Monday the 20th. The NYT ad, and the media coverage that it has elicited, don't seem to have had any immediate, significant effect on Firefox adoption.

17 December 2004

Firefox Adoption 1.4 - the day after the NYT ad

I woke up this morning curious about the number of people who had downloaded Firefox the day of the two-page Firefox ad on the New York Times and its explicit invitation to "Download Today from GET FIREFOX.COM".

Reading the Spreadfirefox counter, the ad seems to have had no impact at all. Compared to yesterday morning, the number of estimated downloads has increased of about 230 k, which has been the average in the past five days or so.

It is obviously too early to draw any conclusion on the impact of mass-media on what has been up to know essentially a tight development/diffusion process based on web-media and community. The next days will tell us whether traditional media campaigns can still make any direct contribution to adoption of innovations.      

16 December 2004

New York Times Firefox ad published today

Good timing for the publication of the Firefox ad on the New York Times, an ad paid for and designed by the Spreadfirefox community.

Since the 11th in fact the Spreadfirefox site counter has kept adding downloads but at a  somehow slower pace. The average number of downloads has been about 200k per day over the past four days (from a low of 180k to a high of 230k) compared to 220k on average in the previous ten days

I'm looking forward to the immediate effect that the NYT Firefox ad will have on the number of people switching browser in the next couple of days and on the longer term viral effect it will hopefully generate.

There has been a precursor. The Mozilla Europe community financed and designed a Firefox ad which appeared on the December 2nd Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Does anyone know what kind of effect the ad had on Firefox adoption in Germany?

It seems to me very important to understand the roles that traditional  mass-media and web-based community and one-to-one media play in the diffusion of innovation. Especially, as in this case, when they are combined.

   

10 December 2004

Firefox Adoption 1.3

Since the last post on Firefox Adoption, on December the 1st,  the downloading counter indicates 2 M supplementary downloads in nine days. This corresponds to a mean of around 220.000 downloads per day; with a high peak of 400.000 and low peaks of 150.000 downloads a day. There may be a correlation between low peaks and week-ends. Compared to the first ten days after 1.0 launch, between November 9th and 19th, when on an average day the number of downloads was around 460.000, adoption is growing more slowly but steadily in a quasi linear fashion.   

01 December 2004

Firefox Adoption 1.2 - false alarm

The SpreadFirefox counter has reached 7.6 M browser downloads today. I'm glad that the apparent slowing down adoption trend I wrote about two days ago was a false alarm, possibly, as I suggested, related to Thanksgiving Day.

One million more downloads took place in the past two days what represents even an acceleration. However, some people may have postponed switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox to after Thanksgiving Day. The next few days will tell us whether adoption is indeed accelerating.

30 November 2004

Broadband adoption - Hong Kong and Asia Pacific - 1.0

I was trying to put together some sort of unified view of Broadband Internet adoption in Europe, along the same lines of what I just did for the US, when I read Elizabeth Lloyd's enthusiastic article on Hong Kong's Digital Potential and turned my attention to Asia-Pacific instead.

There is a second reason to that. I'm having a lot of trouble with gathering statistics on the European Information Society. Contrary to the US, little of this information is available online. Few reports can be downloaded for free. Most of them have to be ordered, sometimes only by fax; have to be paid for in advance with no preview available. A good example is the process designed to order EITO's European Information Technology Observatory 2004. It is enraging!

Hong Kong
Hong Kong has a total population of 6.8 M people. Nielsen//Netratings indicates that they are 4.9 M to use the Internet, that is almost three out of four Hong Kong residents (72.5%). In the summer 2003, 66% of Hong Kong households had a Broadband connection.

Since 2000, when Internet users were 2.3 M, adoption rate has been very high to 113,7%. Elizabeth Lloyd invokes Hong Kong's early embracing of the Internet in 1991, high-living standards, relatively low access prices, good infrastructure, in terms of both PC penetration and broadband offer. ITU places Hong Kong world second behind the Republic of Korea in Broadband Internet; and world third for second-generation mobile penetration.   

Asia Pacific
Looking at the Asia-Pacific region more broadly, the ITU Asia-pacific Telecommunication Indicators 2004 report indicates a 38% increase in the number of Internet users from 2000 to 2003, for a total Internet population of 255 M. Broadband penetration is also very high, four of the top ten broadband-connected countries are in the region: the Republic of Korea (23.3%), Hong Kong (18%), Taiwan (13.4) and Japan (11.7%). Singapore is very close also with a penetration rate of 10.1%.
Among the factors invoked to explain strong adoption are:

  • a favourable regulatory environment
  • the emergence of regional equipment manufacturers
  • urban demographics

Quoting the lead author of the report, Eric Nelson

The role of governments has also been critical in helping the rollout of broadband. Governments have taken steps such as becoming pre-eminent adopters of the technology themselves, stimulated the development of adequate national backbone networks, created incentives for the establishment of competition, interacted closely with the private sector and given subsidies and other incentives to extend coverage into rural areas to reach new groups.

Nevertheless, let's not forget that within the region very large disparities exist between the developed urban and the less developed areas.




29 November 2004

Firefox Adoption 1.2 - is it slowing down?

I'm worried. I've been monitoring the downloads counter at SpreadFirefox and, though the number of Firefow downloads is increasing nicely, it seems to be doing so at a gradually slower pace. In four days (Nov 19 to Nov 23) Firefox was downloaded 1 M times ; it took six days to add another 1 M downloads (Nov 23 to Nov 29). Thanksgiving Day may explain this in part.  But what I'm most worried about is the difficulty with crossing the chasm.

23 November 2004

Firefox Adoption 1.1

Four days after my last post on the adoption of Firefox, the SpreadFirefox counter indicates one more million downloads, to 5.6 M. And OneStat.com, a Dutch Web traffic analyst, reports an increased share of Mozilla-based browsers (7.35% up from 2.1% six months earlier; Firefox accounts fro 4.58%)  and a decreased share of IE browsers (88.9% down 5% from six months earlier) among 2 M Internet users who visited International sites monitored by OneStat.com. 

In Firefox cutting into IE's lead, Paul Festa quotes Mozilla's release manager Asa Dotzler:

We're seeing a much swifter uptake for 1.0 than for the preview release, which took more than a month to reach 5 M downloads. We're clearly reaching a new world of users and we're doing it at a faster pace than any time in Mozilla's history.

19 November 2004

Firefox adoption 1.0 - Should Firefox diffusion be more viral?

The SpreadFirefox campaign
Since the launch of version 1.0, the 9th of November, efforts to promote Firefox and foster its adoption beyond the web developers community have multiplied. The community-based SpreadFirefox campaign has grown to 25.000 volunteer marketers, has banners and promotional buttons advertising Firefox on around 100.000 web sites and significant coverage in blogosphere, as well as in the more traditional medias. The most spectacular action has been to collect 250.000$ from the community in response to the invitation to donate money to finance a full-page ad on the New York Times. And the SpreadFirefox community is working on the layout and wording of the page itself.

Spectacular adoption rate
In these first days, the community-based SpreadFirefox campaign has had some spectacular results. As of today, November the 19th, Firefox has been downloaded over 4.5 M times (see counters on SpreadFirefox web site). Reports from webmasters of web professionals’ sites indicate that the number of visitors using Firefox browser is on the rise, overtaking in some cases IE. Web Analystics firm WebSideStory (via LinuxInsider) has witnessed a decrease in the number of US users using IE to view the sites it analyses: they were 95.5% in June, 93.7% in September, 92.9% at the end of October; and a gradual increase in the number of Firefox users, that it estimates to be at 3%. A very rough projection, using the Computer Industry Almanc figure of 185 M US Internet Users, would put the number of Firefox users at approximately 5.5 M.

Will this spectacular adoption rate of about 500.000 new Firefox users per day continue? And for how long?

These are obviously very difficult questions to answer. What is certain is that, for this trend to continue, Firefox has to grow beyond its technical home base and engage the larger community of Internet users. The Mozilla Foundations is very much aware of that as this quote from Mitchel Barker, Mozilla Foundation's president, clearly indicates: "our entire start page is new, and that reflects our ongoing goal of appealing to the general consumer market". 

The browser market is saturated, every PC has a browser; it is dominated by one product, Internet Explorer; web services and web sites are built and designed for the dominant browser and most Internet users seem to be relatively happy with IE. Certainly, IE's limitations are known and no significant new developments are in view, while Firefox represents real progress and innovation not only because of its features and of its development processes, but also for what it represents as a collective achievement by the open software community.

Will these arguments be enough to engender a strong uptake by the majority of pragmatic Internet users? In this respect, are the SpreadFirefox initiatives rightly targeted?

My feeling is that the campaign should make a larger effort to support more virality, in the sense of more direct - personalised - one-to-one sharing between Firefox users and their friends and relations. This form of virality is a necessary complement to more traditional mass media communication which diffuses more impersonal, generic representations about Firefox. Ideally, Firefox users should be in the position to give their friends a tangible proof of how Firefox use empowers them, just like it happened when people sent their friends and relations an email using HotMail or with a PayPal payment. These emails had the advantage of presenting the service in context - HotMail in the context of an email conversation; PayPal in the context of an economic transaction. At the same time, they created awareness, interpretation, and even more importantly a situation that favours identification and invites imitation. In this direct form virality bridges the gap between being exposed and trying out a new service, at a degree that is unreachable by mass media communication. Firefox is an experience, and a friend's experience of it provides one of the best possible proofs.

Assuming that this approach makes sense, how could it be implemented?
A signature, however nice, at the end of the message remains external to the main context. It is in fact the text of the message itself, plus surrounding information like the address used, the object or the time the message was sent that create the context. If the signature appeared on a webmail, there would at least be the minimal context of the browser, but not everybody is even aware of that. The best idea that comes to my mind is a personal email sent to friends that contains a link to an interesting page that should be viewed using Firefox. But I'm not sure that is such a good idea. 

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