Image advertising the Tawkon App

Few days ago I run into an article on Wired talking about a new App released by Tawkon that is providing information on the level of radiation you have been exposed during the day (or week, month …  whatever) by using your cell phone.

The article provides an explanation of some basic terms like SAR and also some background on the potential effect of electromagnetic radiation.

I am not an expert in the field, although I have been working for several years with researchers studying SAR for cell phones and taking care of the scientific communications, so I do not want to comment on the potential damage, if any, resulting from exposure to cell phone radiation.

What I am interested in is the thin line existing between data and information. Unfortunately, most of the time we tend to mix the two, we perceive data as information and this is misleading.

In this specific case Tawcon App is measuring the electromagnetic field of your cell phone taking data from the cell phone chips (your cell phone has to know what kind of power to use to send signals to the remote antenna) and applies an algorithm to calculate the cumulative effects. However, there is no scientific proof indicating that electromagnetic radiations have a cumulative effect on bio-material (that is your head..) and the cell phone does not know how you are using it (e.g. you may have it in contact always on the left ear, sometimes you switch ear, sometimes it is not in contact at all …).

Hence, the data accumulated are basically meaningless. Tawcon is careful to state that the apps is just to warn you of the use of your cell phone and it is up to you to decide if that usage level is too much (too dangerous). But if the data are meaningless, what actually is the information provided? Zilch!

What is wrong, in my opinion, is that by providing data we create a perception that does not correspond to a scientific fact. And this goes both ways. You may scare people, or you may provide a false sense of assurance.

I guess this is one of the big problems we have always faced, but in the Internet age with the abundance of data the risk of being misled is even greater.

Facebook has been under fire from US lawmakers, senators, consumer groups and the European Union over new features that they claim compromise the privacy of its users. The message is loud and clear: users desire to have precise and comprehensive controls and want them to be simpler and easier to use.
Last month Facebook introduced some features that include the ability for partner websites to incorporate Facebook data, expanding the social network’s presence on the Internet. US senators are worried that personal information about Facebook users is being made available to third party websites, advocating that sharing personal information should be an opt-in procedure in which a user specifically gives permission for data to be shared. Moreover, they underline how Facebook now obligates users to make publicly available certain parts of their profile that were previously private.
On Saturday, Facebook said it plans to simplify privacy controls at the popular social-networking service to appease critics. However, a shift to an opt-in model does not seem to be in Facebook’s projects.
The privacy issue is taking a toll and it could reopen the competition.

MySpace is trying to return to the limelight by announcing that online privacy is taken very seriously at the company, announcing that it’s planning the launch of a simplified privacy setting for its user profiles. It might be a good strategy to regain popularity over Facebook, seen that Myspace is seeking to differentiate itself from the rival that long since has definitely eclipsed the News Corp-owned social networking service with its more than 400 million members. And according to what Facebook announced at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference a month ago, the company has gained more than 10 million active users in 3 weeks. A significant number? When compared to 2009, not really.
There is a two weeks ago article in which the author argues that looking at the past growing of Facebook, despite its optimism in announcing an ever increasing customer base, Facebook’s active user growth dropped 25% to 50%. The privacy issues might be hurting? Or simply Facebook’s growth just suddenly peaked, as it happened with other SNs?

Here at the Future Centre, studying business ecosystems prompts the question “is it nature-like?”, stimulating us to see the market through the Darwin’s eyes, by observing what happens in nature and decoding it. So, before talking about the Future of Marketing, it is interesting to start by some concepts that belong to genetics and to the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Evolution basically depends on two main factors: a random process and the natural selection, that is the anti-thesis of randomness. While the allelic drift occurs in a population through random sampling and chance, selection always impacts gene frequencies in populations by removing unfit phenotypes and letting survive beneficial ones. And the phenotype of an individual is any observable trait of an organism – its set of characters such as morphology, development, behavior, biochemical or physiological properties – that results from the interaction between the inherited genotype, the sequence of randomly written instructions it carries within its DNA, and possible non-hereditary external factors. If we make a table of  correspondence between phenotype, on one hand, and a genotype-environment combination on the other, we obtain the so called Norm of Reaction, the range of phenotypic expressions produced by a single genotype, due to different environmental conditions.

Different phenotypes within the same species

Imagine now to apply this generally accepted theory to the biz: does a matching with nature help in understanding? We believe so. If you think about business ecosystems, in fact, you find that both Genetic Drift and Selection processes are well matched by inventors’ Creativity and Market pressure respectively. And since the relation between Genotype (inventors’ Creativity), Environment (Market) and Phenotype (Offer) is expressed in the NoR, we can find there a possible model underpinning for the Science of Marketing.
We are living the Social Network Era and the old Internet we know is evolving into a “Internet of People and Things” that knows us – our digital shadows are becoming larger and larger – completely changing the market place. So, within this scenario, which are the right marketing strategies?

We believe that companies will need to face this crucial question. For this reason, we are trying to foresee how Marketing is going to change and how we’ll handle it, being aware that the emergence of a new kind of marketing goes hand in hand with the technological progress, especially in the ICT field.
The web 2.0, and the future 3.0, the one that will involve also things, is bringing a drift in the established  industrial paradigm. This has implication on Industrial Districts where enterprises, with their own business creativity and different application fields, get together in order to develop strong abilities to face external markets, to enable business growth and cut costs.
In our studies we found several new issues that need to be addressed in order to understand and manage this new kind of Ecosystem Marketing.

In a nutshell:

1. Internet as a distribution channel that is enabling almost endless Apps (third part services), confirming the tendency to add services to products, enriching the offer and giving it a marketing burst;
2. The importance of knowing the customer, through his profile (LIFE), and how to share this information among the actors of the ecosystem to offer personalized products and services;
3. The need for a “value tracking” as a default ecosystem instrument to validate and ensure new business models (e.g. dynamic revenue sharing);
4. The emergence of the social networking phenomenon, as a still-to-monetize enabler of the word-of-mouth marketing and the growing importance of reputation;
5. The search for fully customizable user roles and permissions;
6. The competitive advantage acquired by targeting multiple audiences on the web from multiple directions;
7. The relevance to build a customer experience through an integrated offer to realize every single marketing specificity due to brands and their homogeneous aggregation, since an ecosystem is made by different companies and their brands are positioned over different market segments;
8. The new role of the Business Intelligence within a business ecosystem (LIVES);
9. The need for new skills in today’s corporate environment, both human resources and entrepreneurs, to manage such a huge relationship net and face the complexity of this new marketing based on cooperative relations and with the network as a strategic asset;
10. The consciousness that both the IT workers and the marketing professionals need to realize that only by cooperatively working together they can build and improve a strategically numbers-driven unit capable of harnessing the coming data explosion.

Fabio & Mattia