A New Start

FT: Japan's quest for innovative freedom

Japan's quest for innovative freedom

By Jonathan Guthrie and Robin Harding

Published: June 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 12 2008 03:00

Nodding politely, a mechanical doll created by Toshiba founder Hisahige Tanaka totters across a tabletop and offers a visitor a cup of tea at the company's research and development centre near Tokyo. Ingenious and intriguing, the automaton was produced in the 19th century, portending the renaissance in Japanese applied technology that followed the second world war. This delivered such consumer boons as Toshiba laptops, Toyota cars and Nintendo games.

Now Japan is questioning wheth- er its innovation system can serve it as well in the 21st century as in the 20th. There are doubts over whether Japan's Y18,000bn ($168bn) annual R&D budget is well spent. Reformers want an environment that is more entrepreneurial and less dominated by big companies. Corporate R&D bosses and academics are struggling to put aside long-standing grudges.

If Japan were a technology company it would be worried about its pipeline. The job of replenishing this has traditionally fallen to big corporations such as Toshiba. Ichiro Tai, a jolly, bespectacled man who runs Toshiba's R&D centre, says: "We have 1,000 researchers and they should have far more ideas. The number of patents [one each a year] is far too small."

Dissatisfaction is as much a management tool for Mr Tai as it is for a sales boss driving his team towards ever-higher targets. Tosh-iba could nevertheless do with some high-profile breakthroughs after losing its battle with Sony to set the standard for high definition video players. Mr Tai duly shows off hopeful new technologies to awed visitors. One is a system that uses quantum physics effects to encrypt data. Another is a battery that can be recharged in five minutes which could be used to power electric vehicles.

Mr Tai muses that greater freedom could spur the creativity of company research staff. Yet Toshiba is characteristic of Japanese technology companies in protecting its elite scientists from commercial pressures more than many western ones. The electronics group, which had sales of about Y7,000bn in the year to March 2007, uses a tripartite structure. The R&D centre and its academic satellites do blue-sky research. A second tier of labs commercialise new technologies. A third layer engages in the nitty-gritty of improving existing products within business units.

Politicians and bureaucrats are now asking whether Japan is over-reliant on such corporate ideas factories. Like every country with a decent science base, Japan envies the global success of Microsoft in PC operating systems and Google in internet search. Surely, the argument runs, Japan would produce new global gorillas of its own if its innovation system were more like that of the US.

The Japanese government has accordingly announced a Y100bn venture fund to invest in fledgling technology businesses. The idea is to encourage more private and institutional investors to pump their money into start-ups too.

However, there are formidable barriers to injecting some of the pep of Silicon Valley into the commercialisation of new technology in Japan. The biggest is that Japan does not have an Anglo Saxon-style enterprise culture. Would-be entrepreneurs have few role models apart from Masayoshi Son, founder of communications group Softbank. Aspiring to become very wealthy is regarded as faintly unJapanese.

Equally, "business failure is seen as shameful in Japan, though that perception is beginning to erode", says Seiichi Yoshikawa of Nippon Keidanren, Japan's powerful business lobby. When new technology ventures fail, it tends to be as units of large corporations, rather than as standalone companies. This cushions the impact. The downside of the system is that it can suppress maverick talent.

At Japan's ministry of economy, trade and industry, Yuji Tokumasu, who works on science and technology policy, is fretting over a parallel problem. According to a chart he brandishes, even as Japan's spending on research and development has soared in the past 20 years, value added in the manufacturing sector has stagnated.

Japan already spends more than 3 per cent of its gross domestic product on R&D - more than any other country. One way of reading the chart is to surmise that diminishing returns have set in, that every extra yen spent on R&D goes to employ less talented researchers, who study less promising approaches to the same problems. Japanese universities' poor record on turning research funding into results published by top scientific journals suggests that government money can be more efficiently spent. It could be that rather than spending too little on R&D, Japan spends too much.

However, Mr Tokumasu and others in the technology establishment take heart from R&D expenditure data. If only Japan could convert all of this spending into scientific breakthroughs, new businesses and saleable products, they argue, it would prove a powerful source of economic growth.

The country has a world-class science base, as exemplified by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University. In 2006 Professor Yamanaka created cells resembling embryonic stem cells from other tissue in mice. Last year, in parallel with US researchers, he repeated the feat for humans. The technique has huge potential to advance gene therapy, given moral strictures on using real embryonic cells. Prof Yamanaka has a chance of winning a Nobel Prize.

But businesses can be impeded from working with university researchers such as Prof Yamanaka by historically chilly relations. During the growth years of the 1960s and 1970s, corporations sought independence in R&D. Public service anti-corruption rules made it difficult for academics to hobnob with business people. It is telling that two of Toshiba's most important academic collaborations are with British universities - Cambridge and Bristol.

In 2004 universities were incorporated and gained ownership of the intellectual property created in their laboratories. The change irritated some people. "Before, they got research for free," says Takafumi Yamamoto, plain-speaking boss of Todai TLO, Tokyo University's licensing organisation.

Mr Yamamoto believes the dominant role of large corporations in business life is weakening. Partly thanks to entrepreneurship education "young people do not all want to be soldiers for big companies", he says. Flotations of university spin-outs have increased enthusiasm for the commercialisation of research among academics. They are meanwhile likely to become more assertive in protecting their intellectual property rights following the establishment of a new division of the High Court specialising in IPR. Mr Yamamoto says: "There could be an increasing number of cases brought by the universities against the companies."

So is traditional Japanese consensus under threat? Not according to Yutaka Asai, chief technology officer of Oki, the telecoms and printers group, who neatly reconciles the spat between business and universities. Companies may wind up with a smaller share of revenues from individual academic collaborations, he says. But, at the same time, a fairer division of the spoils should prompt more tie-ins, making everyone better off.

A 'technique' for managing academics is vital for collaboration

Yukinori Kida, owner of a small Toyko-based components business, has some advice for big Japanese companies forging collaborations with universities. Making it work depends on "technique" in managing academics, he says.

Innovation has helped KDA keep going in the face of Chinese competition. Six years ago, with help from the University of Tokyo, the company found a better way of moulding the ceramic bolts used in equipment exposed to high temperatures. The breakthrough allowed Mr Kida to cut costs and won him a valuable market niche.

KDA, which employs 50 staff including Kaori, Mr Kida's daughter and expected successor, made a profit of Y30m on sales of Y1bn last year. It is now working on new plastics and ceramics moulding methods with researchers from Tokyo and Nagoya universities. "In three years we hope to double sales," Mr Kida says.

KDA spends a healthy 3 per cent of sales revenue on new product development. Mr Kida uses students as researchers, believing they are open-minded as well as cheaper: "University professors are strong on narrow subject areas, but if you need to study a problem from a new perspective, they are really not that good."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Brickfish aiming to use viral adverts to catch the attention

Brickfish aiming to use viral adverts to catch the attention

By Paul Taylor in New York

Published: July 3 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 3 2008 03:00

When Kodak, the US photo supplies company, decided to re-enter the inkjet printer business with a range of printers that claim to cut the cost of ink in half, the company chose an unconventional way to get the message out.

Kodak teamed up with a San Diego-based start-up called Brickfish that has pioneered a new web-based viral marketing method called social media advertising.

Together they created a campaign dubbed "Pricey Ink Stinks" built around a competition that challenged online visitors to find another use for their old, ink-hungry printer and blog about it, take a photo, draw it or video it for the chance to win one of the new Kodak models.

The campaign was a success, generating 87 entries and more than 173,022 "engagements" which Brian Dunn, Brickfish's chief executive, claims are a much better metric than unique visitors or page views. Engagements, or a campaign's "e-score", measures consumer action defined by entries, votes, reviews and views of branded user-generated content.

Clients use the Brickfish platform to launch online advertising and marketing campaigns designed to capture the attention of consumers - particularly the young, creative and connected - and tap the power and reach of social networking.

Instead of marketing to consumers, the Brickfish advertising platform effectively co-opts consumers who become part of the campaign, generating blogs, images, video and audio content that is shared virally and voted upon. Meanwhile, Brickfish enables its clients to monitor and track the campaign through "viral map" technology that provides detailed analytics about campaign reach, performance and demographics.

"This viral, consumer-driven marketing approach has proven to be five to 10 times more effective than existing online advertising methods such as display ads and search optimisation," claims Mr Dunn.

With online banner ads stuck with their 0.1-0.2 per cent click-through rates, marketers at big-name companies including Samsung, Nike, Qualcomm and Procter & Gamble have begun to listen.

P&G used Brickfish to launch a campaign for its Aussie shampoo brand. Like the Kodak campaign, the Aussie effort was a contest site. The competition attracted 4,017 entries and more than 2m visitors, 80 per cent of whom were viral connections through sites such as MySpace, MyYearBook and SugarFoot. Brian Jochum, P&G's Aussie brand manager, described it as one of P&G's most successful engagement branding efforts so far this year.

"In order to broadly reach consumers across the internet, Brickfish provided us with a highly cost-conscious and effective method to virally spread our brand name to thousands," he said.

Using Brickfish's media platform, P&G was able to track not only the initial message sent but subsequent ones to other social networks.

In total, Brickfish has launched more than 200 campaigns for clients, including about 30 for the fashion and cosmetics industries.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

By Alan Cane

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Amore incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster's name was Leo. It was the world's first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.

Sixty years ago, nobody would have seen anything like Leo. Official secrecy meant that the public knew nothing of the spectacular progress made by British scientists in developing the code-breaking digital computer, Colossus, which helped win the second world war. Civilian computers did not exist and nor did the software to run commercial applications. Caminer was the intrepid, determined person who invented the first business programmes.

What made his achievements as the world's first commercial systems analyst so extraordi-nary was that he started from scratch. At the time he was the systems manager for J. Lyons and Company, then Britain's biggest caterer. The Lyons board had heard about the development of "electronic brains" in the US but those were all being used for scientific or military purposes. Lyons, which prided itself on its efficiency, took the remarkable decision to develop its own digital computer to automate the running of its catering business.

Caminer was the key member of a team of bright young technologists responsible for bringing to life the vision of the Lyons board. Leo - Lyons Electronic Office - ran a programme for the first time in September 1951. Under Caminer's tutelage, the Lyons team developed systems and ways of working that were groundbreaking for the time and are still relevant today. Indeed, if the rules for systems development laid down by Caminer had been taken to heart by succeeding generations, fewer computing disasters would have tarnished the image of the industry.

Caminer programmed Leo to take over routine office tasks and do them in a fraction of the time taken by clerks. Where it had taken eight minutes to calculate an employee's pay - Lyons had 30,000 workers - Leo could do it in 1.5 seconds. Leo was programmed to handle the daily deliveries from Lyons bakery to 200 retail outlets, to organise restocking, to calculate the overnight production requirements, such as how many miles of Swiss roll had to be made, and even to work out delivery routes for vans. Later, Caminer ran programmes that could detect patterns in the till receipts and pinpoint when the company's restaurants were busiest and which of its chocolate cakes and iced fancies were selling best. Today, businesses analyse such information as a matter of course but in the 1950s this marked a retail revolution.

Soon other major companies such as Dunlop, Ford and Imperial Tobacco were coming to look at Leo and learn from it. Lyons set up a subsidiary to make computers and 80 Leos were sold all over the world.

Caminer, a charming individual with exquisite manners and a delightful sense of humour, had a short fuse where programming standards were concerned. More than one of his colleagues had work literally thrown back for failing to meet his expectations. Yet Caminer himself had had no training in computing - hardly surprising because the subject was so new that everybody involved in Leo learned on the job. What was unusual was that Caminer was not even a mathematician and had no formal academic qualifications.

Born David Tresman in 1915, he was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant. His father died fighting on the Marne when he was three. When his mother married again, he adopted his stepfather's name. Raised initially in London's East End, he later went to the Sloane School in Chelsea but by his own admission he was not a natural student. He was more engaged by unemployment and the rise of rightwing dic-tatorships in mainland Europe. He spent his youth pamphleteering and, as he put it, "generally fostering the revolution". He marched against Oswald Mosley, the anti-Semitic British fascist leader.

Having failed to get into Cambridge - he said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches" - he became a management trainee at Lyons through a contact of his mother's. The catering group, which served millions of meals every year, was known for its tea shops and Corner House restaurants with waitresses known as "nippies".

On the outbreak of the second world war, Caminer joined up and served at El Alamein, where he recalled the "wondrous sight of a desert fox crossing the shimmering sands at first light on the morning of the battle". After being wounded in the western desert and losing a leg, he returned to Lyons, becoming manager of the company's systems research office. It was then that he became involved in its computer project - on a salary of £5.05 a week.

Leo eventually became part of what was then the British computer champion, International Computers - ICL - and Caminer was appointed head of market development. He was asked to take charge of software for ICL's New Range 2900 series, its flagship through the latter part of the last century. He specified the ICL operating system VME/B, a brilliant concept that was in some ways too advanced for the machines on which it was expected to run.

Caminer completed his career by implementing the European Union's computer and communications network in Luxembourg. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.

He always believed that small, close-knit teams of the sort that worked on Leo were the ideal: "These days the spirit has changed," he complained just before his death. "Computer staff have become nine to five workers. Teams are so large I'm surprised they ever get anything done."

He is survived by his wife, Jackie, whom he married in 1945, and by their three sons and two daughters.

Alan Cane

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The machine that spun the world around

The machine that spun the world around

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 24 2008 03:00

Publishers see world-changers everywhere. There is a book called Tea: The Drink That Changed the World . There is Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and that paean to Japanese motor manufacturing The Machine That Changed the World .

Tucked away under a counter in your kitchen, or gurgling in your utility room, is another machine. It has barely altered its appearance, function or performance in nearly half a century, which is perhaps why no one has thought to publish The Washing Machine - Which Really Did Change the World.

The washing machine transformed our workplaces and our families. It freed women from their most time-consuming household task, allowing them to get out and work.

Historians attribute female liberation to several causes. There was women's experience running second world war production lines, a memory that survived the 1950s return to domesticity. There was the contraceptive pill. There was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , with its account of the suburban wife, lying beside her husband after a day of household tasks, too afraid to ask: "Is this all?"

Without the fully automatic washing machine, which appeared in suburban homes around the time of Friedan's book, it might well have been all.

In their paper "Engines of Liberation" , Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu recount that, after the second world war, the US Rural Electrification Authority timed a farmer's wife doing the washing by hand and then with an electric washer.

She took four hours to wash 38 pounds of laundry by hand. Doing the same load with an electric machine took 41 minutes. And this was when the machines were more primitive than today. For example, she would have had to use a separate contraption to wring the clothes.

While the machines have changed, the essential process of washing has not. Since ancient times, people have poured water on their clothes and agitated them to get the dirt out. In their article, "An Introduction to the Historical Developments of Laundry" , Mark Stalmans and Walter Guhl recount how the ancients used to beat their wet clothes on riverside stones.

In Elizabethan England, washdays took place only every two to three months, but were dramatic occasions. The laundry was soaked in large wooden tubs. "All available women and girls hitched up their dresses and stamped and danced on the wet clothes," Stalmans and Guhl say.

In the 19th century, clothes were stirred with a stick. Manually operated wooden containers followed, allowing the clothes-washer to agitate the clothes inside. In the early 20th century, electric machines emerged. In 1937, Bendix of the US introduced the first machine with a wash, rinse and spin action to remove the water.

In the 1960s, washing, rinsing and spinning machines became the norm, turning laundry into something to be done between returning from work and feeding the family.

And that is where the cycle stopped. The industry boasts of progress since: special washes for wool, settings for half-loads, microprocessors (a dubious advance - at least mechanical processors could be repaired) and machines that sense laundry weight. But the method remained the same: pushing water through clothes or clothes through water.

Indeed, in one respect washing machines have remained the most conservative of businesses: there is no global product. Europeans have largely relied on front-loaders; Americans prefer to load their laundry from the top.

There is no doubt which is better. Consumer Reports, the US consumer organisation, has struggled to find top-loaders that wash as well as front-loaders. (Front-loaders' tumbling motion gives a better result.) This year, Consumer Reports trumpeted the news that it had found a top-loader to match front-loaders' cleaning quality. But top-loaders still used more energy and water.

Not that front-loaders are easy on water. Waterwise, a campaigning organisation, conservatively estimates that British households use 474m litres of water to wash their clothes every day.

Could we change our laundry habits? Researchers at Leeds University have come up with a way of washing clothes that uses only a cup of water. The dirt is absorbed by plastic chips that tumble with the clothes, which emerge almost dry. They can be briefly hung or ironed, eliminating the need for tumble dryers. Xeros, the university spin-out that is commercialising the technology, says the chips last for at least 100 washes.

The researchers expect almost waterless machines to be produced next year. Good luck to them. Washing machines may have revolutionised our lives, but the association of water with cleaning is as old as laundry itself.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/taylor/2008/05/wy_zappos_pays_new_employees_t.html

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

I spend a lot of time visiting with companies and figuring out what ideas they represent and what lessons we can learn from them. I usually leave these visits underwhelmed. There are plenty of companies with a hot product, a hip style, or a fast-rising stock price that are, essentially, one-trick ponies—they deliver great short-term results, but they don’t stand for anything big or important for the long term.

.....

Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 - Help Set a World Record

FT: Fashion retailer custs a dash online

Fashion retailer custs a dash online

By Adrian Michaels in Milan

Published: June 3 2008 19:34 | Last updated: June 3 2008 19:34

The world of high fashion presents a public face of catwalks and cocktail parties on hotel terraces. Yet much of the real work is as likely to take place in grey warehouses in drab logistics and distribution parks.

At one such site on the outskirts of Bologna recently, the uniform industrial lines on display were set off by fringed black clouds and driving rain. Inside, though, lie the operations at the heart of one of the fastest-growing companies in online fashion retailing.

Founded by Federico Marchetti in 2000, Yoox started by selling end-of-season fashion gear by big names on its own website. It has since successfully broken down two barriers: persuading people to buy clothes before trying them on by offering a trial period at home and a free return service; and persuading high-end fashion companies to relinquish control of the marketing and distribution of some of their clothes.

Bringing high-tech culture
to Italy’s students

One of Federico Marchetti’s most important decisions was to base his internet company in Italy, a country not known for its venture capital and with a very small IT sector. He says these concerns were outweighed by the need to woo Italian fashion houses.

“I think of Yoox as a fashion company via the internet rather than an internet company selling fashion.” To fashion houses, he says: “We have the same roots and we understand that what they are selling is emotions ...it’s been a very strong competitive advantage to be based in Italy.”

But the downside is the difficulty of finding people in a country he says has no technology culture and no culture of service.

Mr Marchetti says he spends one-third of his time recruiting.

Now Yoox is tackling the problem head on. In conjunction with Politecnico di Milano it is co-founding a master’s qualification in internet retailing and fashion. The first students will start in October and Yoox staff will host some seminars. Mr Marchetti is hoping he can recruit a few of the graduates.

Mr Marchetti is still selling the end-of-season lines, which fashion companies traditionally move through discount outlets, but also offers other items such as vintage clothing and work by new designers. It has been a gradual process of persuading fashion companies to put part of their brand management in someone else’s hands. Yoox, for example, has never displayed the original retail price of items, or presented its offerings as discounts. Instead all items are sold at their “Yoox price”.

And the company has now succeeded in winning contracts to build and manage the internet retail sites for such famous companies as Armani and Diesel. Further deals are in the pipeline. Gross sales have grown to €90m ($134m) in just eight years, the company is heading to profitability and headcount has risen from 40 to 200 in the past four years. An initial public offering is being considered for 2009, which will propel Mr Marchetti further into the spotlight.

The 39-year-old founder says he had wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age. “I came up with many ideas before but none of them were good ideas.”

Mr Marchetti, who speaks softly and with a ready smile, corrects himself: “Actually some of them were good but I couldn’t leverage my expertise. When I was 19, I came up with the idea of putting together a cellphone and a camera [this was in 1990]...Perfect idea – now everyone has it – but I’m not an engineer so if I’d knocked on Nokia’s door they would have said ‘Thank you, bye-bye’.”

Mr Marchetti displays a sense of humility when describing how he set about building the right skills to run a business. “Even if I had dreamed of being an entrepreneur since I was about 13, I knew that I didn’t having any experience or background and I had to learn,” he says.

In the past, he believes, entrepreneurs could be driven by instinct. “I took a different approach and I decided to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time in order to make the fewest possible mistakes.”

At 19, he left his home town of Ravenna, on the north of Italy’s Adriatic coast, and went to Bocconi university in Milan to study business. He took jobs in corporate finance at Lehman Brothers and had a stint at the consultants Bain. He did an MBA at Columbia Business School in New York, specialising in retail and entrepreneurship. “None of these jobs I liked, most of them I hated. But they were very functional to my learning in order to start my own business.”

He says he learnt about business plans at Lehman. “In terms of dealing with my investors I think it was very good ... You need to approach [potential investors] on your own. It’s very important that you do the spreadsheet yourself in Excel – sales, margins, write-offs, variable costs, fixed costs. You understand where the red flags are.”

Before approaching investors, though, he needed to have his big idea. This came in 1999, when he saw the possibilities of putting the internet together with fashion. “Fashion is about exclusivity and the internet is about accessibility... if you are called Pucci [the Italian brand that is now part of France’s LVMH], you are a very exclusive brand, [and] online you can have one store with your name. It’s the perfect location.”

Mr Marchetti also had no money. An internet company was an attractive option because of its relatively low costs. “I was 30 and living in Milan. This was end of 1999. I was jobless and had a lot of debt. I had a business plan and a lot of enthusiasm. In Italy, venture capitalism is not so developed. Everyone said ‘What a fantastic idea, who else is financing you?’ They were just waiting for someone else to make the first move.”

Soon, however, he met Elserino Piol, a former senior executive at Olivetti. Mr Piol agreed to pay €1.5m for a share of the business and another €6m on condition that in three months the website was running, the first orders were coming in; and some key recruits such as directors of logistics and inform-ation technology had been made. 

Mr Marchetti established that the concept behind the company worked by agreeing a partnership with a store in Bologna. He took products on consignment from the store’s warehouse and sold them online, keeping a percentage of sales revenues.

No one, he says, was buying fashion on the internet at that time, so he attracted publicity and the orders started to arrive. The second tranche of funding was secured, just. “In April-May 2000, the bubble burst for internet stocks. If we had not had a contract for the second tranche it would never have happened.” He recounts how he changed the company name from Yoox.com to Yoox Spa, the latter suffix being the Italian equivalent of “Inc” or “Ltd”. “In 1999 [you needed] ‘dotcom’ [in your name] and then one year after...if you were a dotcom they treated you like crap.”

Mr Marchetti says about 75 per cent of Yoox customers are satisfied former customers. “Once you try and you understand how it works, you come back . . . they can touch and try everything, but at home – not in a shop. It’s a different and probably more favourable location. At home you can mix and match with your wardrobe. You have two weeks to change your mind. In a shop the timeframe is half-an-hour.”

About 20 per cent of orders are returned, a percentage that has remained stable over time. At almost €10m, by far the company’s largest cost is its UPS bill.

Yoox is growing so fast that it has moved warehouse three times. The latest, in the Bologna industrial park, is a short drive from the company’s headquarters and has 18 photography studios amid 20,000 sq m of storage space. Every item sold by Yoox on its own website or on those it has built for other companies comes through Bologna or other warehouses in Tokyo and New Jersey. In eight years, Mr Marchetti has built a global operation.

What advice does he have for entrepreneurs? “Many people tell you what to do [but] there are no experts, don’t listen to the experts...There are too many people doing things by the book. You can be successful only if you have the courage to differentiate.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Telepresence

videos/links at:
http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html
http://www.musion.co.uk/Gorillaz_MTV_Awards.html
http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2007/04/02/theater/20070401_LOSING_FEATURE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/theater/02eyel.html

The 'Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience' was an ambitious collaboration between Cisco and Musion Systems, which took place during the opening of Cisco's Globalization Centre East in Bangalore, India.

Musion seamlessly integrated their 3D holographic display technology with Cisco's TelePresence's system to create the world's first real time virtual presentation.

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who was live on the Bangalore stage, 'beamed up' Martin De Beer, the Senior Vice President of emerging Technologies, and Chuck Stucki the General Manager of TelePresence, live from San Jose, California. Chambers was then able to have a 'face to face' discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the future of Cisco TelePresence, demonstrating first hand the potential capabilities of the system in front of the watching audience.

This demonstration married the telepresence display technology of UK based Musion with the ultra high definition camera and codec technology that powers the Cisco TelePresence offering and the Cisco Human Network that hooked together Bangalore and San Jose.

How The Heck Did They Do That?

The Musion display technology is similar to the tech that telepresence provider Digital Video Enterprises uses for their seamless tele-immersion room.  A sheet of Musion's patented, transparent Eye-liner foil is stretched across the stage.  The ultra high-definition image of Marthin De Beer and Chuck Stucki are captured in San Jose and the images of the virtual humans are then transported over the Human Network to be displayed in Bangalore.

The Cisco shots make it difficult to see the technology at work but the New York Times ran a story illustrating some of capabilities the Eyeliner video product brings to a modern theater production. It helps make the tech more tangible.

Actors (not seen by the audience) are reflected onstage on a nearly invisible screen, observed by Aldo Perez, right, in the play "Losing Something," at the 3LD Art & Technology Center.

The Musion system takes a captured image and shines it down to a mirror on the ground with an ultra-bright projector. The image then bounces off the mirror and is displayed on the Eye-liner foil (as shown above). For more images of the process at work, check out the Times' slideshow

An excellent example of the Musion system technology shown in the Gorillaz video performance. The MTV Europe Awards marked the first live performance of Gorillaz. The Musion® Eyeliner™ System was used to beam the three-dimensional holographic performing cartoon characters on stage.

Their appearance at the 2005 MTV Awards was billed as the 'world's first 3D hologram performance' and was one of the highlights of the evening.

As the world's most successful "virtual band", the human artists behind Gorillaz traditionally appear at live gigs as silhouettes on a giant screen combined with images of their cartoon alter egos. However, with the help of Musion® Systems, they were able to perform in full holographic glory.

videos/links at:
http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html
http://www.musion.co.uk/Gorillaz_MTV_Awards.html

http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2007/04/02/theater/20070401_LOSING_FEATURE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/theater/02eyel.html

FT: Restyle in the aisles

Restyle in the aisles

By Elizabeth Rigby

Published: May 27 2008 22:11 | Last updated: May 27 2008 22:11

For many of us, wheeling a trolley up and down supermarket aisles is a routine affair. But for Dina Howell, the minutiae of shoppers’ wanderings on their weekly shop is very interesting indeed.

Ms Howell, who is in charge of all of Procter & Gamble’s in-store marketing worldwide, wants all the details, no matter how small. She wants to know how many people walk down the haircare aisles in a superstore and at what time of the day. She wants to see whether bigger, brighter displays attract more customers. And she wants to use this knowledge to try to understand how P&G can sell more of its goods in superstores.

To this end, P&G and a dozen other consumer goods companies – including Coca-Cola and Kellogg – and 18 US retailers such as Wal-Mart, Walgreens and Target have each spent $250,000 on “project Prism”, an initiative led by AC Nielsen, the media rating agency.

Infrared sensors have been dotted through 166 superstores in the US to monitor the movements of millions of shoppers as they push their trolleys along the aisles.

“It is a big test,” says Ms Howell, her eyes widening as she contemplates the information being gathered, and then extrapolated to apply to thousands of stores.

“We are getting data from the US right now and it is very interesting. Of all the business that happens [for P&G] in the US, we are getting data on 60 per cent of those volumes.”

Prism – “pioneering research for an in-store metric” – uses infrared beams to track shoppers’ movements and then correlate them with sales data. Advocates describe it as the first truly scientific measurement of the effectiveness of in-store sales tools such as shelf location and promotional displays.

The findings are still under wraps, but Ms Howell, who gave a talk about Prism at the annual World Retail Congress this year, says the research could change all manner of aspects of superstores, from how the retailers sketch out their floorplans to the types of products they stock.

“I suspect [that] with Prism we will begin to understand those aisles that you and I enjoy shopping [in] because they are so empty. Retailers will maybe start thinking ‘should I be devoting that level of real estate [to those categories]’,” she says. “I am sure that there are categories being underserved, but that data will reveal it.”

That could mean changes such as cutting back on the homeware section in return for bigger health and beauty aisles. But it could also bring about changes to how stores are set out if retailers and consumer goods companies can work out what type of shoppers go where and why.

In one retail chain, AC Nielsen monitored who was shopping in the haircare and soft drink aisles for a month. During that period, 1.7m shoppers – 1m of whom were women – walked through soft drinks but gave the haircare section a miss.

AC Nielsen estimates that half of those 1m women were between the ages of 24 and 54 and therefore the target audience for makers of shampoos, conditioners, hair dyes and styling mousse. Getting even a fraction of them to walk through the haircare aisle could eventually amount to millions of dollars more in sales.

“If you are not a huge company, you might not be able to get retailers to change around aisles,” says David Sommer, managing partner of in-store media planner MEC Retail, who is also involved in the Prism project.

“But say there is someone who you want to sell breakfast cereal to and you know they don’t walk down that aisle – you could find another place in the store where you could reach them, such as putting a sign in the dairy section to remind them that breakfast cereal is a good way to start the day and point them to aisle two.”

As well as spotting missed opportunities, Prism can help consumer goods companies work out whether in-store campaigns are really converting browsers into buyers.

“[Ahead of a marketing campaign] we monitor the amount of people walking through and we are able to know that 15 per cent of people were converted to buy that category [be it haircare, detergents and so on].

“If we then do a marketing exercise in that aisle, we can measure if the conversion rate is higher, say 20 per cent,” says Ms Howell.

“Then you can take the difference [in sales volumes] times the average dollaring [sales] and know what the size of that prize really was and not what it was projected to be.”

In July, Nielsen will start selling the Prism data to a wider group of companies in the US.

Mr Sommer says: “It is a huge deal. Up to now, in-store [marketing] was handled by the sales guys who worked for Colgate or Campbells or P&G and it was just about stocking them high and letting them fly. Now it is much more analytical, so you are not just trying to sell things, you are trying to understand who you are reaching.”

Ms Howell, a veteran of 18 years at P&G, says that reaching those women who might buy Tide for their laundry or Pantene for their hair is getting trickier in the internet age.

“The way to get shoppers’ attention is so scattered – if you think about daily life, how many things do you do in a day? So it is very important to find ways to get to her.”

Until now P&G has spent $7bn a year talking to “her” through television and print adverts. But that could change as it tries to reach out to the shopper in the aisles instead.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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