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Mobile App Disruptions At CES

This article is more than 9 years old.

I capitalized on my early arrival for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by attending partner conference AppNation VI, where I met quite a range of mobile app companies. This app-centric show doesn’t explicitly focus on mobile; that’s simply where the action is in today’s app marketplace.

My interest this week – at CES as well as at AppNation – was to uncover disruptive innovations that might impact the enterprise market. Here are the four vendors (either exhibitors or simply fellow attendees) who stood out as having products most likely to disrupt existing business models.

Discover-Able

Discover-Able (www.discover-able.com), division of The Tone Knows) is a business-to-mobile advertising network that embeds an audio “barcode” into any media with audio that any enabled mobile device can recognize. Thus any enabled app can provide the user with contextual advertising – or any other contextual content, for that matter.

People cannot hear the audio barcodes, naturally, making this technology reminiscent of the signals placed into the television blanking interval back in the analog TV days that supported early efforts at interactive television.

Discover-Able is similar in some respects to Shazam, which can recognize songs and TV shows, thus responding with contextual content when one comes on the air – only Discover-Able allows marketers to embed its audio codes into commercials, retail background music, or any other source of audio.

The disruption: if Discover-Able can manage to embed its software in popular mobile apps, then marketers can signal those apps whenever they are within audio range, no beacon required. Expect to see this technology at concerts, theme parks, stadiums, malls, or other venues already equipped with public address systems, as well as any radio or television content.

Ninja Metrics

Ninja Metrics (www.ninjametrics.com) has invented a way to measure how users influence each other and how much that influence is worth. Their product, the Katana® Social Analytics Engine, uses predictive analytics and automated social graph analysis to help companies identify, understand, monetize and retain valuable customers based on how influential or influenceable they are.

One of the core challenges with most marketing analytics applications today is that they are able to measure correlations but not causal relationships. Marketers, however, need more than correlation. They must know what factors lead to achieving key business outcomes like sales conversions.

Ninja Metrics has solved this problem within the realm of influence measurement, thus giving marketers an important tool for determining their marketing attribution – which marketing investments give them the best return.

The disruption: Virality has proven to be fiendishly difficult to predict. Ninja Metrics gives marketers a tool to better understand how to construct messages that will go viral. The secret recipe will never be straightforward, as too much success tends to backfire, so learning how to achieve the proper balance will prove to be the key to optimizing influence-based marketing.

Clickslide

The new product from recently funded Clickslide (www.clickslide.co), Datadipity, is a cloud-based declarative mobile application construction and integration tool – at least, that’s how I describe it. They refer to it as “a structured data layer for web connected objects and services,” or perhaps as an application programming interface (API) conversion, mashup, and publication tool.

Declarative, template-driven development tools have been around for several years. Earlier generations focused on proprietary solutions, leading to customer lock-in. In contrast, Clickslide takes a standards-based approach, focusing entirely on the APIs that form the glue in today’s digital application environment.

For mobile app developers, a tool like Datadipity can dramatically accelerate the development process, especially across different platforms: Apple iOS, Google Android, mobile web (HTML 5) and others. Their declarative approach also insulates app developers from API updates and other changes to the distributed environment, an essential enabler of modern agile architectures.

The disruption: Mobile apps will be much easier and faster to create, opening up mobile app development to a wider population of developers. Furthermore, the fact that Clickslide enables app developers to extract more value out of APIs will shift the revenue generation focus from the apps themselves to the API marketplace, just as the gold rush made millionaires out of the shovel salesmen.

Tomorrowish

Tomorrowish (www.tomorrowish.com) bills itself as a “social media DVR.” That description captures the essence of the tool, but there’s more to Tomorrowish than that. In fact, social media aficionados who watch Hulu may already be familiar with their app.

Tomorrowish works with both live and prerecorded content, but its value proposition for live programming is the most striking. The problem with live-tweeting live shows, of course, is the time zone issue. The east coast will see the show live, but the west coast gets the delay.

To address this problem, Tomorrowish curates the social media during any program and replays it (after filtering it for trolls and spam) for the delayed audience – as long as they use an app enabled with Tomorrowish’s technology.

Furthermore, tweets from the delayed audience go into the curated stream as though they were live, so everyone else in that time zone – or viewing the show later – can see them at the appropriate point in the show.

In fact, if you record a show for viewing later, Tomorrowish still works. You see the social media stream synchronized with your own viewing, and your tweets enter at the appropriate time.

Under the covers, Tomorrowish uses sophisticated natural language processing to filter off-topic or inappropriate content. In fact, the White House even used Tomorrowish to filter Koch brothers-sponsored scripted propaganda from a recent live Obamacare discussion, according to Tomorrowish.

The disruption: The time zone problem has limited television producers’ ability to create interactive programming, where audience members can vote live and see the results of the voting on the screen.

With Tomorrowish, the interactivity still can’t go on the main live feed, but can augment a second-screen add-on to the live program. Therefore, expect to see more television programming with richer second-screen synchronized content.

Disruption is Hard to Find

Among the dozens of vendors at the conference, I managed to select these four gems from the dross of less innovative, sometimes deeply flawed business models. Some vendors had no way to solve the network problem (where their app would only be useful if large numbers of people were to already have it), while others simply lacked sufficient originality, a rational monetization strategy, or an adequate addressable market.

Even the four vendors I selected present only rather limited disruptions. I doubt that ten years from now, we’ll be able to look back on this article and say that the world has changed because of any of these four – or anybody else at AppNation this year, for that matter.

Then again, disruptions can be extraordinarily difficult to predict, and every vendor is doing their best to innovate. I might be wrong about the limits to today’s disruption. We can only hope that we’ll be surprised.

Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.

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