Acme Thoughts Incorporated

Is Microsoft’s Exit from CES a Sign of Trouble for the Megashow?

While some will point to Microsoft’s exit from CES as another sign of the company’s decline, I think it’s not that at all.  Instead, I’d propose that losing a major anchor supporter like Microsoft is a sign that CES is a show past it’s prime and a sign of things to come. 

So what do I mean?  First off, anyone who goes to CES knows that the show is has so much “noise” now, simply figuring out what is important and what isn’t is difficult in itself.  Apple knows this and for this reasons chooses to stay away, instead wisely focusing on their own shows. I think Microsoft will, much as it has with the Microsoft Store, take a cue here from Apple and will likely put more effort into its own vendor showw as the place to break news and introduce big products.

But it’s more than that. CES used to be about TVs, living room technology, audio visual. But as the PC world began to focus on digital entertainment in the late 90s, the show began to expand, and now it includes so much stuff (they have a connected car pavilion, a mobile health pavilion, and so on and so on) that the show has become almost too general. 

Some would argue that something had to replace Comdex, which used to be the big general purpose technology show, but I think that instead CES is in danger of becoming the next Comdex. Too big, too general, when people can go do specific shows that have a narrower focus.

Will CES survive? Perhaps. After all, it’s still Las Vegas in January, when everyone wants to get out after two weeks with the relatives. But I think they may need to refocus and not try to be all things to all people. 

Badge Inflation

So I missed the news that Foursquare was beginning to release more badges by letting their users “level up”, but couldn’t help but notice the change when I started getting a badge for nearly every check in this past week. 

And, when I say every check in, I pretty much mean every check in (lately my Foursquare usage has slowed to a slowed to a crawl as, well, I’ve gotten pretty bored with check-ins).  Last night I got some random pizza eater badge, and tonight I got a Hot Tamale badge, and last weekend a Bento badge for eating sushi.  

Now, I think what they’re doing makes sense.  As I’ve said, checkins are boring, and while Foursquare has started to offer me local checkin deals to sweeten the pot, deals aren’t always easy to cash in nor are they always something I want to cash in.  

That was the case tonight - I checked into said Mexican restaurant on Foursquare, saw they were offering a spend $7 for $14 worth of food deal, but realized after I hit buy it was a Groupon deal. Now, I personally don’t like Groupon and don’t want to have an account, so I gladly spent the extra $7.  

So while what Foursquare is doing makes sense, it’s not going to help. We’ve been through this before. We’re all tired of check-ins.  Throwing more worthless virtual rewards at us isn’t really going to help at this point. 

What Foursquare and their partners should do is treat checkins rankings as loyalty programs. If, say, I was a level 5 Starbucks user and got half off a drink once per week, now that’d be something worth it. Even moreso if I was getting a free drink every week at level 10.

But until I get some real-world rewards, leveling up is only creating more worthless badges, or devaluing what worthless badges I already have earned.

Loyalty Programs and Collaborative Consumption

I am a big user of Hotels.com and Alaska Airlines, mostly because of their loyalty programs.  Now the thing is, I know that the programs largely suck and that I probably don’t get the best economic return by using these rather than searching out better deals over time, but there is still something the compels me to be a loyal customer of their’s because, well, free stuff is pretty attractive, even if it took a pile of gold to get there.

But as I was thinking how I could use their rather paltry benefits (and discussing a vacation with my wife possibly where we would rent a condo for a few days), I started thinking about whether any of the collaborative consumption vendors (like Airbnb, for example) offer loyalty programs, and what these would look like?  Presumably the owner of a property who puts their place up for rental into the sharing marketplace would need to get compensated for any rewards “cashed in”, and I would imagine that the marketplace owner (Airbnb) could make it work where they could offer free goods after they are earned. After all, using Airbnb isn’t that unlike Hotels.com, in that they take a cut for being the “marketplace”.

 I Googled Airbnb and loyalty program and got a big goose egg, which is strange to me. Isn’t it time they started thinking about it?

Minecraft

My 10 year old’s new obsession is Minecraft.  If you haven’t spent any time with this game, it’s a building block game focused on acquiring resources to build and survive.  It’s fairly rudimentary in its look (which is to say it’s nothing like an HD game for the Xbox 360).  But, unlike most console games, what it does do is allow the kids to actually create rather than just, say, shoot things.  

And that’s what I like about it.

My son loves to build things as it is - Legos, stop motion movies, etc - and this feeds into that.  It’s also an example of the types of a pastime that kids have that we didn’t necessarily have - open-ended, entirely virtual. Not to say we didn’t have our own games (in my case an Apple II with text-based adventure games), but it boggles the mind how many more great things kids have at their disposal as compared to when we were kids.  

And yes, I know, things like video games can be a detriment, can actually rob kids of their creative expression if all they do is consume and don’t actually create.

And creating is what Minecraft is all about. 

This morning he called me over, pride in his voice, of a house he build using diamonds, which he had acquired through mining deep into the earth.  

Sure, maybe it wasn’t a new story he had written or  song he had composed, but it was still creating rather than consuming, something most kids do too little of these days.

My Future of the Book Conversation

At GigaOM’s Roadmap event this past week, I had the pleasure of talking to both Richard Nash of Small Demons and Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling,  about the where the book will go in the future. It may have only been half an hour, but we covered a lot of ground.

We talked about the future of the book as it becomes electronic, weaves in social streams in and around the reading experience, and as more and more “book” creators put in things like audio and video.  We also discussed about what happens to bookstores when, ten years from now, kids may see the paper-bound book as an artifact from a world gone by.  We looked at how publishing will change in coming years as the newer forms of electronic distribution right the wrongs of the current model, the biggest of which is, as Richard put it, only 7% of the economic value of the book going to the creator of intellectual property. Lastly we talked about how e-books and e-reading could close the huge learning gap in emerging markets.

So take a few minutes and listen, I think you’ll enjoy.

Watch live streaming video from gigaomroadmap at livestream.com