GPS, data caps and a crushing blow to location based services

For the first time ever I have received a warning that my smartphone data usage was coming close to my monthly limit.

It’s actually only the second month I’ve had a data limit – part of the joys of a new contract with O2 on an iPhone 4S.

I was assured when taking it out that my data usage was well within the limits they set. (A quick check of my records reveals I used no more that 175mb/month in the 3 months previous to the new contract).

I thought nothing more of it.

Until I got a text on Jan 31 telling me I’d used 80% of my 500mb limit and it wouldn’t be reset until February 7.

I hadn’t been streaming radio or video. I had maybe shared a handful of images the whole month. My iCloud settings were set to synch only when on wifi and the phone is plugged in.

In fact I did all the checks and there seemed little out of the ordinary.

In short I had used my 4S pretty much as I had the 3G it replaced and it was eating 3 times as much data.

O2 (via twitter) suggested it may be apps I’m running in the background. But of course apps don’t really run in the background, they only activate when called on (at least any built for IOS4).

I checked anyway. Cleared out loads of stuff in there.

The critical ones, it may be, are those which require GPS – ie location based stuff. The two key culprits for me; Googlemaps and Foursquare.

I’d rather like to leave them on, for the obvious reasons.

And I suspect the nascent location based services industry (which the telco's would also benefit from) would rather like us to leave them on, too. Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, the new limits on data use the telecoms industry seems so keen on look ready to strangle it at birth.

Don't know about you but I feel like I'm paying so much more for so much less. In the meantime, I guess this is what Onavo.com is for - download it free at the appstore.

And talking of App(le) Stores, O2 ended up setting up an appointment for me at my local Apple Store. They say they have had cases of iCloud using 3G for back-up even when it appears to be set to Wifi. They also, kindly, added a free data bolt-on to cover me this month while we investigate.

But if Apple can't find an issue with my phone (and I will update this when I have a result) then O2 and other providers may have to face up to the issue that their data limits are woefully inadequate to support today's smartphones and the ecosystem they promise to deliver.

UPDATE (Feb 3, 2012 2pm): The Genius bar at Cambridge (UK) could offer little advice other than try resetting the phone in the hope that perhaps one of my apps is incorrectly installed and continuingly calling on data when it shouldn't be. This (after the traditional 2 hours or so of back up and synching) I have done.

IF this does not work (ie reveal a significant fall in data use compared to previous, then Apple suggested I take it up with the operator who may be miscalcuating data (they've seen rare cases). And if that fails they'll try me with a new phone... Will keep you posted.

Honing the past versus building the future

Image via http://www.oldukphotos.com: Kingsway 1920

This decade looks increasingly as if it will be defined by the clash between those seeking to make the old world more efficient and those aiming to build a new one.

By which I mean as we hurtle towards the flowering of the full impact of digitally-driven faster, easier, cheaper, group-forming abilities, the defenders of the old will seek to use the technologies simply to lower the cost of doing the things they've always done.

This can loosely by characterised as channel management. Business as usual with a veneer of 'social' technologies at best. This is the world of the turn key solution.The rest of us, those building the new, must find ways to bring them with us.

The urgency becomes greater by the day. There is an oft-quoted peculiarity about the impact of new technologies on society: a consistent 20 year cycle between innovation and its widespread adoption - together with the impact wrought.

I spoke about this in New York in 2008 when I suggested the key technology in our case is user-friendly social networks - as these delivered simple and cheap group-forming into the hands of the mainstream.

I benchmark the beginning of this process as 2003 - the year MySpace launched.

Which means next year will see us half way through the 20-year cycle of disruption. My favourite example of this (via Vin Crosbie) is the impact of the car. In 1900 the streets of London were full of horses. 20 Years later? Full of cars, trucks and buses - and garages, and petrol stations, and new roads, and people and products travelling further, more regularly, more quickly.

In 1910 if you were a horse cart manufacturer you were likely feeling the pinch. But you still had a choice.
You could have chosen to stick to business as usual and used the new tech to make your business more efficient. You could have bought in cheaper supplies, wood, nuts, bolts, studs, leather. Delivery trucks could get you them cheaper and faster. You could deliver your carriages to customers farther afield - on the back of trucks.

You could make your old world more efficient with the tech of the new.

Or you could have joined in making the new world - turning your skills and resources to truck and car making. (If you want a starker example still - consider the cavalry charges and the emergence of the tank in World War I).

One scenario gave you a fighting chance of still being a business in 1920. And if you still want to be in business in 2023 you know the choice to make.

Related articles

• There is no insight button (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Facebook needs to try much harder for its $100bn

Facebook's valuation is - apparently - justified by how much more accurately it will be able to target folk for 'conversion' very soon.
Not a religious thing, but that greater than ever ability to spot you and sell to you that you've been waiting for (ah hem).
Hmmm.
Our pension fund holders are really going to pile into Facebook based on last-century's ad model?

Let's review for a moment.
Facebook is not an audience. It is an aggregation of small groups of people who care about each other (mostly) and a few that circulate around brands (mostly as a badging excercise or in hope of being thrown a fish or two).
I don't know of any groups that formed to be marketed to (either on Facebook or elsewhere). Facebook could test this by setting up the 'I signed up in order to be better targeted by advertising' group and counting the likes...

The broader point is this: targeted advertising - no matter how clever - remains advertising - a broadcast bodge job being unsatisfactorily applied to a networked medium.
I'm reminded of this, from ex-Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

It's a shame that Facebook's share of the big brains can't be refocused, that Facebook can't take the opportunity to build new relationships between brands and their customers, to help shape alternatives that do fit the networked model.
Where is Facebook's product suite for innovating with customers - for making customers partners with brands in pursuit of things they both care about, for example?

I thought we'd all established we don't want to be targeted, we don't want to be marketed to, we want to join in, we want to market with.

We don't want better messages - we want better things.

Of course, we've said all this before (see below). I guess it wasn't a £100bn question last time.

The Death Of Advertising: Omexpo Madrid 2010

View more presentations from david cushman

Seriously, Facebook, try harder. You've got an opportunity to change the future for the better, not simply hone the past.

Related articles

• Facebook's Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior (techcrunch.com)
• Facebook to file for IPO as early as this week (buzzom.com)

The monkey in the machine

Here's another chance to see the marvellous Mark Earls (@herdmeister) present at the RSA on how things spread - how that social sharing thing happens (much less rational than we like to believe of ourselves).
I'm a big fan of Mark's book Herd. And no doubt I will be of the signed copy of his new book I'll Have What She's Having - when it arrives... (hint).

Related articles

• Why no one wants to be in your club (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• I'll Have What She's Having by Marc Earls #TMRE #MRX (lovestats.wordpress.com)
• Somebody tell me what I want (herd.typepad.com)
• Et cetera: Steven Poole's non-fiction choice - reviews (guardian.co.uk)
• The Hazards of Herds and Tribes (marketingtechblog.com)

There is no insight button

I really worry about the turn-key, one-size-fits-all tech and tool solutions for social media being churned out by software and SAAS vendors for baffled brands and companies right now.

For example, this from a press release I saw on Thursday January 19:

“[Brand X’s] enterprise marketing technology allows global brands and agencies to easily activate social audiences and impact consumer actions on all major social media ecosystems simultaneously.”

My  translation: With one button you can broadcast at anyone fool enough to have followed you so far. If they happen to have stayed around since you bought them, that is.

Job done then?

What worries me is that hassled execs will take the magic bullet being offered – we all like to make ‘life simplifying’ decisions. It’s very seductive to sign up for a one-stop solution because it’s easier than understanding what they really need to. It’s unlikely to be more cost-effective though.

As I wrote previously for a piece with Ninety10 Group CEOJamie Burke (note and disclosure, we co-founded that international business consultancy together.)

Business as usual wants a set of turn-key tools to make everything all right. But the future isn't about tools. It is about behaviours - understanding changes, learning from them and responding to meet those changed needs.

Business as usual wants ever-more efficient ways to exploit customers. But the most efficient way of meeting need is delivered by a shift in mind-set not in technologies; a shift that thinks of customers as your partner in producing what matters to both of you.

Business as usual wants to exploit channels to deliver messages. Click to deploy. But the future resides in better understanding why people would want to share 'your message' - getting to grips with the idea that marketing isn't done to people, it is done with people.

A tool or set of tools won't - of themselves - deliver the change you need to shift out of business as usual. And unless you take the holistic view, unless you go through the culture shift, the organisational change that is required, the tools will lead you back to square one.

As Ninety10group Head of Innovation Steffen Huck points out “There is no ‘insight’ button on any dashboard.

There is no ‘Cultural Change’ button, either.