The volcanic
explosion of social networks in the recent years has led to an archipelago of social
networks where all of us are sharing our lives straddling across islands with diverse
social graphs. Michael Arrington poignantly pointed this out in Tech Crunch recently
when he wrote that
The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way….Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it
Who knows? Keith
Curran might be that someone who could
help us find a way out of this mess.
He presented his latest concept product, “My Life”, at Virtue Insight’s Mobile Content Summit 2011 recently in Delhi. My Life aims to centralize the entire social web experience of the customer.
He presented his latest concept product, “My Life”, at Virtue Insight’s Mobile Content Summit 2011 recently in Delhi. My Life aims to centralize the entire social web experience of the customer.
Keith has been one among the pioneers of the UK Mobile Industry since its inception.
Having sold his firm Yes Telecom to Vodafone in the year 2006, Keith, in
his recent avatar as Chief Executive of Steadings Group, has started focusing his
energy towards multi channel convergence. I had the wonderful opportunity to
interact with Keith Curran after his presentation at the summit.
In his presentation, Keith talked about the future of social networks, personalized to the level of the individual wielding the control using the smart phone. Keith walked the audience through a world of possibilities when the current push approach evolves to pull, handing over the reins back to the consumer.
Keith
started his journey in UK’s mobile industry at the network operation level
during its formative years. He later moved on to building subscriber bases. He
founded Yes Telecom, a service provider under MVNL. While building the
subscriber bases, he tells me that he got various insights into the customer’s
behavior. He points out that businesses were making the mistake of saying “Its
my customer”while the truth remained that nobody owned anybody.
In today’s
networked world, customers are free to treat business the way they want. This
made him shift the focus towards the customer. With a mind-boggling array of
options available to the connected customer,
he points out that the big challenge lies in making the customer fully
cognizant of the infinite possibilities available. The key really is to try
and develop a product that puts the customer at the center of everything that’s
happening around his life. It reminded me of what I had written earlier, the customer is at the centre of the universe with satellites of businesses revolving around him.
The
customer’s core identity revolves around plethora of vital information such as email
address, home address, driving license etc that are used at different juncture
of his web experience. The major problem with today’s fragmented social
landscape is that whenever any one of these information changes, it becomes painful
for the customer to update his world. Imagine how difficult it would be if he
were to update all his information stored in various clouds. A centralized social
web can make this harrowing task look so simple like a child’s play.
Any talk of
centralized architecture inevitably brings the question of security. Sensing my
anxious looks, waiting to raise the obvious question of security, he
immediately adds that it would be feasible only when it is proven to be highly secure
within a centralized cloud. He adds that today’s decentralized environment
poses more security risks than ever before, with customer’s information getting
scraped from diverse social networks
and sold to corporations for commercial purposes. He emphatically asserts that the
customer’s personal information has to be the most secure thing in the planet.
In his My Life product, he envisions a centralized
profile module above the layer of modules such as My ID,My Money, My purchases etc. which get available once the customer signs up. The profile module would allow
the customer to update the world he is engaged with. It can be customized granularly
to let him decide which information should be shared to whom. He assures me that
it would take care of today’s ambiguous privacy controls as the customer can decide
the level of social engagement in the web.
In a
centralized profile module, one of the exciting possibilities that emerges is ‘reverse profiling’, managed by the
customer instead of the corporation, through establishing a habit monitor which
would track customer's online activities and could be showed on his consent to the
outside world(businesses), to pull the
most appropriate product depending on his habits.
Keith contrasts this approach with the way it works today where sellers start pushing up products based on what it has found about the customer. He asserts boldly,
Keith contrasts this approach with the way it works today where sellers start pushing up products based on what it has found about the customer. He asserts boldly,
I want to turn the whole thing on its head. Instead of the outside world going to you, you go to them by building your profile and showing it to the world.He fully understands the scale of his vision as he tells me that if he gets to put this product in place, it would probably be the biggest application in the cloud. He also shares his fascination for Apple’s products and expresses his desire for My Life to epitomize Apple's philosophy where you make it so simple so that anybody could do it.
Although the
concept looks enticing, I point out that, referring to the sheer size and
complexity of Indian market, to bring the idea to fruition would involve an
entire overhaul of the current infrastructure. It would require highly advanced
analytics softwares which can handle voluminous data that would be generated. He
agrees and adds that while his team has developed the core technology, he hopes
to pull together several businesses to collaborate to make this happen. Not just one
but several partners from the standpoint of technology, end-users, platforms and
social networks. To achieve My Life
concept, he adds that it is paramount to ensure that the partners are in no
conflict between each other.
He ends our chat
asserting his firm belief about the customer.
If you treat the customer rightly without pushing them, you allow them to develop themselves. And they know you would support them and help them find a way forward. Because what should it be all about is making customers’ life easier.