tablets – Ambility Perspectives

Video – Give the People What They Want

The Ambility team recognized in eMarketer’s “Q2 2015 State of Video” further demonstration that video as a form of web content is exploding. The report cites a wealth of factors driving the increased consumption of video online (including the proliferation of original video content on platforms like Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon; and consumers opting out of cable packages in favor of digital) and highlights important implications from the trend that are essential for marketers and hardware developers like us to absorb.

Contently boils down the implications from eMarketer’s report to five essential takeaways you can see summarized here, https://contently.com/strategist/2015/07/06/the-explosive-growth-of-online-video-in-5-charts/. The Ambility team sees three of those as particularly transformative:

people are spending more time watching digital video than ever before;
people spend more time with digital video than with social media; and
tablet use is soaring.

The online trend toward video viewing is now undeniable. Engagement levels with social platforms have been long recognized, but after tying social media in 2014 when it comes to average time spent per day, in 2015 video pulled ahead. Users are spending an average of 1:55 with digital video each day versus 1:44 with social networks. When we look at all listed digital platforms digital video not only trumps social networks but also digital radio, Facebook, and Pandora.

The embrace of digital video and the extensive time spent per day interacting with long and short form pieces will surely have implications for channels and the devices through which users choose toaccess the internet. Desktops are great for video in certain situations – namely, while you’re sitting at a desk – but increasingly users are instead opting to use more mobile devices for video viewing. Tablet usage for video, for example, has increased at an annual rate of 120% since 2011.

Business and marketers are catching on to this trend and the volume of videos produced for business purposes is also increasing. This goes well beyond pure marketing content and there is every reason to expect its growth to continue. According to GoAnimate, 60% of visitors prefer watching a video to reading about a company. Key West Video says, video “directs users to what to pay attention to first.” Viewers are three times more likely to click on links if there is video involved.

How corporate video is applied will continue to grow and evolve, but content agencies promote a long list of video types that business customers are already leveraging including:

corporate communications;
public relations;
guided tours;
human resources;
training;
induction videos; and
testimonials.

As corporate content of this type is increasingly available in video format users will increasingly seek it as a more efficient way to get their business questions answered, and our multi-tasking culture will seek to consume that content on their ubiquitous mobile devices while they plug through their daily tasks.

Tablet Sales Declining?

Talk about the future of tablet computers these days and you can get a lot of skeptical looks – and no wonder. Recent articles with headlines like “Tablet sales plummet” (Seeking Alpha), “Tablet market slumps as buyers find alternatives” (The Star Online), “Tablets are toast” (The Register) all anticipate a slowdown in the adoption of tablets for business or home use. These arguments are indeed grounded in reports by Apple and Samsung that sales of their tablet devices are down year over year by 12.8% and 17.1% respectively. Those are big numbers that understandably have a lot of analysts and retailers reassessing their plans for investing money and shelf space in tablets. So what’s behind this year on year decrease in sales? It turns out a lot of factors are driving those numbers and digging into them reveals that tablets are far from “toast.”

Some of the slowdown in sales growth can be attributed to the fact that tablet users aren’t replacing these mobile devices as actively as they do their smartphones, so after massive rates of adoption since the introduction of the iPad five years ago a slowdown should have been anticipated. Considering that the features added with successive releases of the iPad have been limited in terms of hardware advances and you have an environment where users are not compelled to trade up to the latest model. “We continue to get feedback that tablet users are holding onto devices upwards of four years,” wrote analyst Ryan Reith of International Data Corporation (http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/tablet-market-slumps-as-buyers-find-alternatives-idc-758976).

More instructive for companies actively developing apps and accessories for tablets are comments from Cathy Boyle, a senior analyst at eMarketer, who points out that “(t)he most limiting factor is the use case for a tablet: It is not as clear-cut or compelling as a communication tool—the core capability and use case for a smartphone.” (eMarketerWorldwide Internet and Mobile Users Q1 2015 Forecast) And Faisal Kawoosa, Lead Analyst at CMR, a leading Indian IT and Telecomms research and consulting firm, notes that “(u)nless the industry make substantial differentiation in the value proposition for potential customers, tablet shipments are not going to grow… With not much value addition coming in the shape of specific solutions to enhance device usability at the moment, tablets are only becoming devices of convenience, essentially larger screen versions of smartphones.” (http://www.cxotoday.com/story/will-tablet-pcs-become-redundant-soon/ October 5, 2015)

We will take up the topic of the place that tablets can occupy distinctly from smartphones and laptops or desktops in a subsequent post, but rather than concluding that the tablet use base globally will decline, as some of the headlines referenced above may lead you to conclude, the Ambility team remains confident in the continued growth of the tablet user base, and we’re not alone. Indeed, eMarketer forecasts that there is still “significant room for increased penetration. The number of tablet users will jump from 13.9% to 19.9% of the global population and from 32.2% to 38.7% of internet users between 2015 and 2019.” (eMarketer Worldwide Internet and Mobile Users Q1 2015 Forecast)

In the world’s most populous countries the forecast is even more buoyant: “Approximately 41.0% of people in China will use (tablets) this year. By 2017, half of the country’s population will do so. China’s burgeoning middle class will be the main force behind growth… Indonesia and India will post the fastest tablet user gains worldwide over the next few years. The number of tablet users in both countries will nearly double in size by 2019.”

Lack of Positive Externalities for the Tablet

The concept of externalities and their impact on products or networks is old and frequently brought up when a technology standards war is underway – such as the ’80s/’90s war between Apple Macs and Microsoft PCs, and now iOS and Android. An externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. At Ambility, we are working hard to launch what we think is a positive external facilitator of tablet computing – an adjustable docking solution that fits beautifully into the home or office – and were struck by Cathy Boyle’s statement quoted above: “The most limiting factor is the use case for a tablet: It is not as clear-cut or compelling as a communication tool…”

We have long viewed tablets as extremely valuable devices for the home and office but recognize that hands-on or desktop usage only accommodates a subset of the overall use cases they are capable of effectively addressing. Yet the level of development for both apps and accessories for tablet-specific usage is limited compared to that for smartphones. According to Econsultancy 61% of companies report building apps specifically for iPads and 46% for Android tablets versus 86% of companies that are building for iPhones and 84% for Android phones. An Amazon search for “iphone accessories” yields 60,673,582 results while a search for “ipad accessories” returns 8,566,193 listings. Development for tablets is clearly of secondary importance, potentially leaving new solutions opportunities unaddressed.

The introduction of the iPad Pro and market adoption of the Microsoft Surface, however, show that the market is starting to appreciate the business related use cases for tablet computers. According to CXO Today Windows tablets are wooing the enterprise. In the Mobility Index Report published by Good Technology, Windows tablet adoption is reported to have increased 400%, from the last quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of this year. (http://www.cxotoday.com/story/are-tablet-pcs-failing-to-impress-business-users/) This is largely driven by the business apps on offer through the Surface and its Microsoft Suite, and iPad apps are slowly catching up. Add enhanced positioning solutions and hands-free interaction capabilities like voice control and look for tablet sales to regain their momentum in the consumer space as well.

In the News – The Rise of Voice Controlled Computing

The Unblinking Eye

We all – at least those of us of a certain age or proclivity for Stanley Kubrick movies – remember Hal. The Hal 9000 was the on-board computer in the 1968 Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey that the hero interacted with by voice alone. For display, Hal only offered one red eye that glowed with unvarying consistency. A toggle switch that indicated only that “I’m on,” even when Dave very much wanted it off.

Ignoring the sinister nature of that particular example, how close are we to having a Hal-like assistant that we can turn to for the complex or mundane challenges of our home and work lives? If development and investment activity are any measure then very soon we should indeed be surrounded by devices that will respond to our voice commands more quickly and more helpfully than those voice command systems companies use to provide “customer service” when we call them.

These new voice controlled systems promise to provide interactions that not only recognize what we’re saying, but can serve up articles, images, and video from any source connected to the internet and feed them back to us immediately – and in high-def. And they recognize what we want without prompting us to “say or press 1” first. They proclaim to understand what we want based on how we’d ask for it as if we were asking a friend or colleague – but promise a more informed response.

At the moment of writing companies as varied as Soundhound (a music search and recognition apps company), Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Conversant Labs (a company focused on providing solutions for the visually impaired) all have releases planned to deliver on-demand, voice controlled computing solutions. If you doubt that voice-controlled interactions will soon be widely available consider this from Wired magazine’s We’re on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants; Francesco Muzzi; 09/2015 – “It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real – and ubiquitous.”

The Ambility team has more than a passing interest in this trend as we hold intellectual property in a solution for flexibly positioning tablet computers, and with their mobile connectivity and rich display capabilities tablet users seem destined to be one of the main beneficiaries of voice controlled computing. When smart, digital assistants can be provided hands free, the value of hands-free tablet use will multiply.

Unlike the Hal 9000, tablets don’t provide an unblinking red light in response to your queries. They provide whatever best satisfies your need. After all, a voice can provide words in response to what you want, but a picture speaks… Well, you get the idea.

It seems clear that we are still at the very beginning stages in the world of voice controlled computing and significant barriers stand in the way of widespread adoption – standards of interaction for needs beyond straight searching and integrating voice commands into popular software and applications are just two. But it also seems clear that voice controlled interactions will help to multiply the use cases tablet computers can satisfy at home and in the office. And solutions for positioning tablets for hands-free use across those use cases will become more and more valuable.