New product acceptance in the public sector

New Product Acceptance in the Public

The conventional media & its saturation:

Since the past decade, the reach of television and other mass media to the younger customers in the developed world has seen a decline. With traditional advertisement methods slowly losing their capability to tap target audiences, companies are turning new approaches to reach customers and create demand for products and services. Three primary reasons account for the traditional media losing their steam in creating demand for products. First, increasing fragmentation- as the number of television channels, radio stations and consumer applications proliferate; the audience splits into even more smaller groups. This makes it more and more difficult and expensive to reach out to a particular audience compared to what it was in the previous years. Secondly, competition from other media outlets has grown. (Marketing to the No-Logo Generation)

Games on mobile handsets, mobile Internet has drawn younger viewers away from television screens. A research in the U.S. shows that on an average, households with Internet connection spent five fewer hours watching television per week compared to non-Internet households. Audiences are deserting television in favor of gaming, mobile phones, and the Internet. Even while sitting before the TV, there are 500 channels to choose from. With media audiences totally fragmented, it is difficult as well as expensive to reach a mass audience. Thirdly, the days of product and service-led differentiation are over as both of these are easy to imitate and in the coming years these cannot be the source of value. Instead, it is imperative that companies have to differentiate themselves on the basis of customer experiences they co-create and provide to the customers. (Marketing to the No-Logo Generation)

Voice-activated Mobile Media:

Mobile telephones have emerged as the new medium for delivering content to consumers apart from receiving and answering calls. The various Value Added Services --VAS presently available on mobile phones through voice-activation are (i) Wireless Internet as the carrier with personalized and mobile devices as the receiving object as a novel way of distributing content is being launched. (ii) New activities: witnessing a live football game with video on a mobile, or seeing a complete movie on it. The outcome of this will be new habits, social behaviors which are new, and a whole new range of multimedia products, novel methods of payment; new digital rights management duties and technologies. (iii) A new industry for distribution: beaming multimedia content over personalized mobile devices that enjoy wireless connection with the Internet to other peer mobile devices is building facilities and at the same time providing great challenges to the present situation. (iv) Distribution of content becomes simpler: Control of content comes to be important to the owners of content. It is therefore imperative that new business models should emerge to satisfy this novel mode of distribution. (Entertainment Media Mobile)

Voice-activated systems are a direct solution to the tedious work of finding media files in a large database. In mobile applications where the traditional man-machine interface tends to be both inconvenient and expensive, speech recognition co-ordinates hands-free operation and effective content access to build a greater natural user interface. Voice-activated systems are important characteristics in smart mobile phones and there is an increasing need for a feature-rich digital multimedia device. Cost and simplicity of use are sometimes what makes the products different in the market place. Voice-activated phones are the solution to attaining these realistic objectives and at the same time offering the hip factor of an ultra modern technology. The cost of voice activating the majority of digital media products like smart phones is comparatively low when the system resource footprint of the speech recognition is unassuming. Leveraging the available system assets enables to keep the cost inexpensive, however what holds a loyal consumer is convenience. (Speech Recognition in Connected Media) smart phone with a great digital media player will not appeal to the user much, in case he often gets upset accessing one file out of several hundred files. With speech recognition and user prompts, there is not at all any necessity to fumble with several buttons and scroll bars. What the user has to do with the mobile phone is that he has to merely say the name of the title, followed by the artist, genre, or metadata information to immediately play the file as also control the player. The natural speech interface is specifically important in applications like mobile phones that have a built-in MP3 player, in which controlling the device and selecting content is convenient. Voice activation provides a natural, 'hands free way to enjoy music or other media without being distracted by means of complicated displays or pressing buttons. Sensory's Fluent Speech Large Vocabulary Speech Recognizer is the perfect solution for digital media applications. Akin to that products like smart phones and digital cameras utilize existing assets to include MP3 player at lower cost and can be activated at small additional cost. (Speech Recognition in Connected Media)

Various perspectives of VAMMM and legal issues:

In this digital age, content protection leads to one of the most serious challenges for communities who own these rights. Their rights are governed under the Digital Rights Management -- DRM. Traditional rights management of physical materials gets its advantages from the material's physical presence that provides certain barriers to unauthorized exploitation of the content. But, currently we already witness serious infringement of copyright laws due to the easiness with which the digital files are able to be copied and distributed. Earlier, DRM focused on security and encryption as the procedure for solving the matter of unauthorized copying which implies locking the content and restricting its distribution to the people who pay for it. This was covered under the first generation of DRM, but there was a considerable narrowing of the real and larger scope of DRM. Under the second-generation of DRM, arrived the description, identifying, trading, protecting, assessing and tracking of all types of rights usages over tangible as well as non-tangible inclusive of management of rights holders' links. Moreover, it is crucial to understand that DRM stands for "digital management of rights" and not the "management of digital rights." This implies DRM handles all rights, not just the rights applicable to permission over that of the digital content. (Digital Rights Management (DRM) Architectures)

While designing and implementing DRM systems, two important architectures are there to consider. The first one is the (I) Functional Architecture that includes the high-level modules or components of the DRM system which in a combined manner provide an end-to-end management of rights. The second critical architecture constitutes the (II) Information Architecture that includes the modeling of the entities within the sphere of a DRM system as also their relationships.

Under the Functional Architecture, the overall DRM framework suited to building digital rights-enabled system can be modeled in three areas. (i) Intellectual Property (IP) Asset Creation & Capture. It pertains to the manner in which to handle the creation of content so that it can be traded easily. This comprises asserting eights when content is first of all created or reused and expanded with the correct rights to do so by the different content creators or providers. (ii) IP Asset Management: The manner in which to handle and facilitate content selling. This comprises of accepting content from the people who created it into that of an asset management system. The trading systems are required to handle the descriptive metadata and rights metadata for example the usages, parties, payments and so on. (iii) IP Asset Usage: The manner in which to handle the use of content once it has been traded. This is also inclusive of the supporting restrictions over traded content in particular desktop systems or software. (Digital Rights Management (DRM) Architectures)

The Functional Architecture specifies the roles and behavior of several cooperating and interoperating modules under the three spheres of Intellectual Property -- IP, Asset Creation, Management and Usage. The IP Asset Creation and Capture module supports the following (a) Rights Validation: to make sure that content being created from the existing content comprises the right to do so. (b) Rights Creation: to permit rights to be assigned to new content, like stipulating the rights owners and permissible usage consent. - Rights Workflow: To permit for content to be processed by a sequence of workflow steps for review and/or approval of rights and also content.

Under Information Architecture: The Information Architecture deals with the manner in which the entities are modeled in the overall DRM framework and their relationships. The primary concerns that need addressing in the development of a DRM Information model comprises of modeling the entities and identifying and describing the entities, and declaring the rights statements. (Digital Rights Management (DRM) Architectures)

The Marketing Domination of Content Provider in Realtime VAMMM Mobile Telephony scenario is evident where the content or brand owners and publishers shall dominate the value chain and will reserve the potential to set the prices as also the revenue model terms. Under the current scenario given this content-brand-driven world, the consumers identify most closely with the content and the brand itself and surprisingly not the device it plays or transmission medium through which is arrives. The other members of the value chain, particularly the service providers and device manufacturers, vie strongly against one another for differentiating content. Through the use of the access in order to top content as currency, content or brand owners and publishers will extend their control of the value chain by buying or merely controlling and by way of content distribution points. (Future Mobile Entertainment Scenarios: MEF White Paper)

Possible opportunities and Risks in the Content Producer Scenario: In this scenario in case when content dominate mobile entertainment, operators and manufacturers will stand to earn just a minor share of content revenue generated while paying for premium prices for exclusive access to brands, In certain cases, operators and manufacturers will be compelled to distribute comparable less-desirable content so as to gain access to popular brands. This group's opportunity lies in its capability to license content that has been demonstrated to be effective in other media for translation to mobile. By providing content owners with mobile expertise, operators and manufactures could gain on content owners' lack of adequate knowledge regarding the medium. Since content owners will all the time be more or less isolated from the technology and the data part of mobile entertainment, service providers and manufacturers could compete effectively with one another by supplying business-critical information to content providers.

Portals: Because of their proximity to the content portion of the value chain, specialty portals and niche-market mobile sites possess better opportunities in this scenario compared to in the two earlier ones. Through a move, which aligns themselves with the content providers, portals can have the potential to give rise to the content wave and capture consumer loyalty. Nevertheless, there will be few independent portals, even in this scenario. It will be publishers and content owners who will be the strongest consolidators who will govern the main conduit to consumers. (Future Mobile Entertainment Scenarios: MEF White Paper)

Service Providers: Service Providers equipped with value-added offerings particularly in the gateway infrastructure, billing, support or tracking will be successful in this scenario. They see an opportunity in the form of providing cross-network services, technical expertise, sales trends and market to content owners. The threat, nevertheless remains that Service providers assume to be natural takeover targets for owners of content looking for growth or control over technical expertise. (Future Mobile Entertainment Scenarios: MEF White Paper)

Marketing Issues in favor of VAMMM:

Of late mobile telephone operators have convincing reasons to integrate voice and data applications. Presently, mobile voice portals support hands-free operations, unified messaging and pervasive access to enterprise data. The various factors propelling this are (i) Mobile users will not be ever completely satisfied with the tiny keypads and screens of the mobile handsets. Voice is the natural human interface, thereby offering a fast and less fatiguing manner of entering the data. (ii) The experience had through the development of mobile voice portal services will be advantageous for every voice-powered Internet applications. Mobile carriers need voice portals which are extremely scalable, their performance are reasonably well in noisy environments, and are especially simpler to navigate. (iii) It is imperative that vendors provide carriers outsourced voice portal services. The mobile phone industry has its hand completely graduating to the 3G and agreeing to that of the FCC's 911 mandate. As a result of carrier consolidation, a tiny minority of voice portals will stand to gain the greater part of business share. (Mobile users like key pads, not speech recognition) iv) Application of the Automated Speech Recognition -- ASR and Text-to-Speech -- TTS technologies embedded inside mobile applications will boost unified messaging. It is seen that mobile users do not have the time or the tools for tackling e-mails and faxes in their native formats. It is through voice technology that enables content to travel easily across one media to another. (v) It will be the turn of the mobile voice portals which will spur the use of Voice over IP -- VoIP The chief advantage of VoIP is that it lowers the cost of transportation, facilitates new telephony characteristics, and lets integration of mobile phones and the World Wide Web. (Mobile users like key pads, not speech recognition)

The Future is Voice:

More and more solutions will be seen in Automated Speech Recognition -- ASR and thus will be available to the market. One instance lies in Text-to-Speech -- TTS in which more natural sounding voices will be provided. This will result in far wider acceptance of speech technology and speed up the drive for more and more applications and improved quality, which will find acceptance in applications for call centers for instance. Through the use of speech technology, it will help businesses function more efficiently which will witness greater application of the technology in mobile devices specially in-car navigation, toys and games. The technology will also witness increased application in products and services meant for the disabled. The industries which will stand to gain from speech applications are those which need to go in for automation any of their processes which are a time consuming one. (Leading Speech Recognition Companies Speak Up About the Future)

In fact any document intensive professions, in which specific terminology is applied, like medical diagnosis, will see maximum uptake of the technology. In the future, voice-activated mobile media will see enhanced adoption by the telecom operators. Information services like weather updates, horoscope results, traffic updates, and news regarding sporting events will appear. It has been demonstrated that when mobile telephone companies adopt something, it triggers a consequent adoption elsewhere. The present level of technology continues to carry over the demands of today and tomorrow, however continued investment in Research and Development will produce higher accuracy and increased text-to-speech. (Leading Speech Recognition Companies Speak Up About the Future)

The Revenue stream for Voice-activated VAMMM:

Dramatic levels of voice-activated technologies and the innovative and customer satisfied business applications have gathered the attention of business managers across the world. When it is developed and completely implemented, basic voice-recognition systems can have the potential to attain accuracy proportions of 97% which is equal to human levels of recognition. Voice commerce will be implemented strongly, especially by businesses in consumer aware sectors like financial services which will garner 39% by the next 3 years, telecom that will witness a 35% share and government 27%. Voice commerce will be often used by companies as part of a multi-channel strategy. (Voice Commerce: A Sound Proposition for Business)

75% of the business who regarded voice commerce would come to be important to them also considered the same in case of wireless commerce. The instantaneous support for voice commerce is evident as it saves on costs and improves service. By adding voice commerce to the present sales and service channels has the potential to cut down the cost of incoming service call significantly. Through the reduction of the amount of time, customers or the mobile worker have to spend waiting for their calls to be handled; voice commerce also improves the level of service. Voice commerce can also be used to generate new sources of revenue. There are quite several mobile operators who have also developed voice portals. These portals both increase the brand of the operator and provide access to a range of revenue-generating services like directory services, the latest news, voice dialing, weather and stock prices. (Voice Commerce: A Sound Proposition for Business)

The Target Markets:

a) The target market in the mid twenties loves entertainment-based content. Content that are interactive in nature are liked best by this target group. The advertisers offering this type of services are provided a lot of opportunities to connect with the audiences through quizzes, games and other interactive features that showcase their products. As far as this youth segment is considered, online music is the king and they download mp3 music more often. (Reaching teens and young adults in the Middle East)

The basic ingredients of VAMMM: