An Open Letter to the Future
Where should I begin…
People have asked me why I decided to join NextStage. I just spent a week with Susan and Joseph here in Madrid and working closely with them. I learned a lot about NextStage, Evolution Technology, and they, too, asked me this question (it was like psychotherapy, working with them. When you take NextStage trainings, be prepared). They suggested I write down my thoughts and this post, the first of a series that I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks, contains my answer. My objective with this series is first explain you why I joined NextStage and where we are (this post) and then offer you the possibility to get involved with us and experience first hand our technology (coming posts).
The Promise That Was The Internet…
In December 1995, I got my first Internet connection. Back then; I was studying at the Belgian University of Louvain-la-Neuve. I had a 14k modem, which was pretty cool back when a 3mb file took hours to download. My telephone bills exploded as I used to spend many nights chatting with my cousin who was based in Pamplona, Spain until 5 or 6 in the morning. Don’t ask me why, but I fell in love with this medium. I knew from the start that I would work in the Internet.
The Internet has been around since the 90s for the general population, we can thus state that it’s a very young medium. As such it’s not yet perfect and many organizations struggle in using it correctly. I used to say back when I was running OX2 that over 90% of websites *sucked*, well I think that nowadays the percentage hasn’t changed much.
I considered then, that Web Analytics was the lifebuoy of the Internet, it’d allow companies understand what was happening inside their websites and following the proper actions would lead to a better Internet. Unfortunately after almost 15 years, the Web Analytics Industry hasn’t managed (yet?) to fulfill its promise (aside note: Joseph has conducted a very interesting research regarding this topic that will be presented shortly in his new Blog: The Analytics Ecology).
If we enlarge our perspective and we look at the larger picture (online + offline), the whole marketing discipline is very often based on guts, beliefs or wrong conclusions based on flawed data… The current marketing is not a hard science, I could also argue that it’s not even a soft science, but often it’s based in what I like to call ‘pseudo science’. When I was responding to RFPs and defending them through presentations back at OX2, I was astonished to see the level of subjectivity in which the (online) marketing responsible of big companies were choosing their agency. In the end it was not about coming with the *best* proposal but with the best seduction exercise.
Haven’t you heard a marketing responsible say something in the lines of ‘I’ve been 30 years in this business I know what works and what doesn’t’. OK fair enough, but times have changed, it’s not the 50s anymore.
Today numbers surrounds us, if you like to do jogging for example Apple+Nike offer you a personal trainer that will spit you numbers every time you go for a little footing. It’s the first time in history that we have so many data available (personal and business wise) which often leads to nowhere. Web Analytics tools are a good example: take the average tool, you’ll find dozens and dozens of reports. For most users this is confusing… what do they need to look at, which are relevant for them and which don’t and in the end what all this numbers mean? A US Institution for example reported us during a study that they were incapable of understanding what all those numbers meant and they were not able to draw conclusions and take action. And they weren’t using Google Analytics with a 0,25 FTE, they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year! This is no different in the Marketing Industry, we have plenty of reports, surveys and stats available. What number/stat are relevant? Not an easy answer. And when you take a look at reality, which numbers are being picked up? Unfortunately, many times the numbers that best serve the preconceived idea are selected. That’s what many consultants do. I’ve seen it!
So my point here is that the current field of (online) marketing is based on moving sands. There is not a commonly accepted theory that can explain the mechanics of this field, thus we’re not able to correctly predict what will be the impact of an initiative. You could argue that there are theories as the 4Ps, but let’s face it, this is not a scientific theory.
Then I Met This Guy Joseph and I thought He was a Little Nuts…
When I first came into contact with Joseph Carrabis and NextStage I was skeptic, as I’ve explained in a previous post, I thought that it was too good to be true. But after having played with it, asked questions, made research and having read a lot of documents that Joseph and his team shared with me, I got convinced. I saw that not only it was possible, also that it made sense and that Joseph had actually achieved it.
From time to time in the past months I’ve been silent. My questions gave me questions and I wanted to be sure of the answers. I have a Cartesian mind and NextStage’s internal documentation isn’t easy for me to read. I took my time and wasn’t happy until I understood the answer and saw it working. I revisited the documents again and again and again, I reread and I played with NextStage tools (and soon you will be able to play with some of them, too). Each time I have a doubt, I study and play until I get convinced. I do this because I’m often facing people that are trying either to discredit what we do or they just don’t believe us, so I have to study and learn. This is not always work for me. On a more positive side, the more I study and learn the more I find inspiration for new tools and applications of the technology. Even if some will never see the day, I really enjoy letting my imagination fly (and when you sit with Susan and Joseph, imagination flying is full of laughs).
For me, NextStage is cool not only because of the fact that it’s something so new and futuristic but also because of the fact that it can do so many amazing things. I feel like we’re in a boat in the 15th century ready to discover the new world. When I was a kid I liked to play with LEGO, what was most appealing to me was to build things, once I built something I moved to build something else and if necessary I would destroy what I had done previously if I needed a particular piece. I sometimes feel that I’m back in those days (remember me to explain you one day my theory of Lego and entrepreneurship 
). Evolution Technology can take many shapes and flavors, this convinces me that I won’t get bored in the future. Let me share something I included in a column I wrote for Online Strategies Magazine that will maybe allow to better understand why:
NextStage’s Evolution Technology (ET) is now a patented field of “basic” technology that early investors have described as being similar to plastic. Like plastic, ET can shape itself to whatever a client’s needs are. As one early investor says:
“Plastic can do anything and everything from protecting your small child dropping a bottle of juice on the floor (it just bounces away) to delivering life-saving medicine or nutrients to a person in the hospital getting an IV. But it’s not really about the plastic, it’s how you apply it. It’s a base, a start. What you can do with it is limited only by your imagination.”
What is it that ET can do that makes it like plastic? It allows any programmable device to understand and respond to how somebody is thinking.
The vision of the Future, objective: happiness
In light of the capabilities of our technology, the possibilities are tremendous. My purpose here is not to list all the products and applications that could be developed with Evolution Technology (Aurélie, my wife, suggests me to crowdsource this; well I might do it in the future ). What I’d like to share with you, is my vision for the future. What will have changed in 20 years? How Evolution Technology can help us live in a better world? But first you need to understand some background information. People that know me, know that I’m not in this field just for the money. I always said that if my aim in life had been to make a maximum of money I would probably be doing something else. My aim is to enjoy what I do and to try to help as I can to shape a better future for my son Luca. Aurélie and I often debate about the foundations of our society and economy. Recently for example we have discussed quite a lot around the notion of Happiness versus the notion of GDP. I will not go into the discussion now, if you want you can read Aurélie’s post that covers this topic. The reason why I’m telling you this is that I believe that Evolution Technology can help us being a happier planet. This is the reason why we’re not searching external funding and we’re a self-funded company; we want to keep the control of how this technology is applied.
Intelligence behind Evolution Technology & Machines
Evolution Technology is thus able to understand how somebody is thinking and respond to it. My vision of this capability is that in the future we’ll have more intelligent machines. I’m sure you’ve noticed, we often say that machines are dumb. Haven’t you yelled in your life against your computer or telephone for not doing what you wanted them to do? You could put it saying that they are as intelligent as they have been programmed. Machines, usually don’t learn and they don’t take decisions by themselves. This is where Evolution Technology enters:
Evolution Technology is able to learn. One example is that it learns languages and learns how people react to the new languages it’s learning. ET is curious and thus when facing something he doesn’t understand it will try to figure it out through experience (Mmmm, doesn’t humans behave in a similar way?).
Evolution Technology is able to adapt. As ET learns by being in contact with people it adapts its beliefs as these change in the society. What I mean here is that people 20yo today are not the same as 20yo 10 years ago and ET is aware of that. Every 3 months Evolution Technology puts itself ‘to sleep’ for a few hours as us humans do every night and then it recalibrates based on the new experiences it has had in the past 3 months. This means that ET gets more and more accurate/intelligent with time.
How this is going to be applied to machines? In many ways, let me give you some examples:
Intelligent Websites
As I mentioned before most websites don’t work. One of the main reasons is that these websites are sending the wrong signals. Joseph says in his latest book:
“Interfaces are like children sent out into the world, Like a child, these interfaces go out to the world and represent the parents’ best efforts to turn the child out right.
Psychologists and family therapists know that families often bring in little Johnny or little Sally and say, “Our child needs help,” when more times than not the entire family dynamic needs help. Little Johnny or little Sally is the family’s “designated client”. Make little Johnny or little Sally well and the family will be well, too. Interfaces, like troubled children, are the designated client in the business communication, marketing and messaging world.”
Joseph Carrabis, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I – p.50
How can Evolution Technology help solving this? First of all ET allows to understand what message you’re providing (eg. Zappos’ Sentiment Analysis with NextStage), and it can provide you with suggestions to correct this message. But going further we could integrate ET with a CMS or a Personalization engine and then provide one2one experiences. This is not science fiction, this exists already. Joseph developed a prototype of this in the early 2000 called ‘The Forest’ and it consists of a website that will adapt itself on every click depending on who’s behind the computer (it can for example start playing music if it thinks that you’re not paying attention to the page and you’re mainly auditory). As I’ve already explained in the past our web technology tracks mouse movements and keyboard activity (not what they type but how), and this information allows us to understand how the user is thinking while browsing the website. As many people has expressed the will to see our technology in action and play with it, I’ve asked our ITs to prepare the Forest again in a server, thus you’ll be able to play with it very shortly for a limited time. I’ll keep you posted in this Blog when it will be available.
Let me give you another example of how ET will be able to help you as a website owner. I guess that you are familiar with the notion of bouncing in websites. During one of the latest tests that we have undertaken we found a way of detecting a bounce 2-3 seconds before it happens. This means that if our technology is linked to a CMS or a real time personalization engine we would be able to send an alert and then something would happen in order to try to keep the visitor in the website. We could go further and not only alert of the coming bounce but also provide some information about the user in order to select the best action. To simplify, we could provide the info visitor33452 is going to bounce and he’s an auditory type. With this information the system receiving the info would play some sound or voice over in the website in order to catch the visitor attention and keep him in the website. You might argue that the visitor might not like this, I would disagree to this assertion, the visitor is leaving because he wasn’t able to complete the reason why he came and he probably leave having had a bad experience. Thanks to ET, we will try to solve this and provide him with what he’s looking for as we will help the website to send the message its trying to send in a way which is compatible with the visitor. The purpose of a website owner (except ad based websites) is not to keep you as much possible on their website, it’s to allow you to achieve something like buying a plane ticket, get some support, … NextStage would then allow website owners to better achieve this.
More secured operations
Evolution Technology is able to learn to recognize people. By being in contact 6 times in a week with an individual, ET is able to create what I like to describe as a brain print (like a finger print but of the brain). This brain print is unique for each individual in the planet, thus it could permit identifying somebody. Once the brain print is in the system, identification can be done in a few seconds on any computer connected to it. (Note: This is something we’re not doing online for privacy concerns, it will be only done with prior authorization).
An application of this is security within companies (it’s stronger than passwords as these can be lost or stolen or even fingerprints as you can get your finger cut) so you wouldn’t need to login, the system would be able to recognize you in few seconds. As Our technology is for ‘any programmable device’ this means that it could also be applied to ATMs where we could see if the person using it is the holder of the credit card. Another security example is plane cockpits, ET would be able to know if the pilot is the correct one and even it could detect if he’s under threat (in case of a hijacking) and send an alert (that depends on the business rules that will be defined in each case). It could be used to deactivate a weapon if the owner is not holding it… From here I let you imagination come up with other applications
As I explained in our ‘Predicting Age and Gender Online’ White paper, ET is able to determine age very accurately. Thus ET could be used to protect children forums from adults with bad intentions (we can also see if the person is in what we call a ‘predatory’ state so we could see if the adult is a parent surfing with his child).
Better learning systems
As you will find out reading Joseph’s last book, Evolution Technology was the result of a question that Joseph had back in 1987: how people go through the different learning stages? This question lead in the end to answer the question of why people excel in certain domains while others don’t.
So education was the aim of this technology when it first got invented. By understanding how people think ET can thus find the best way to provide information. In the field of education, this translates to allowing a system to determine the learning style of any person and thus adapt the material so he will learn it *his way*. Online courses (or any computer based course) for example would adapt themselves depending on the pupil and thus guarantee that they would get the best possible learning from the system.
Getting back to what I said earlier, Evolution Technology is thus as plastic: it can take many shapes and thus have plenty of applications. I think that now with just the above mentioned examples of applications you’re understanding more why I joined Joseph at NextStage.
So where are we right now?
As I’ve said in the past, the first months at NextStage I was feeling like Charlie in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Joseph is as prolific researching as he’s prolific blogging, thus it was hard deciding which way to go. But we decided to go in the (Online) Marketing field as our main focus for this first stage.
The prototypes that Joseph had developed were not made for enterprise situations, their scalability wasn’t there and the technology was a bit. Thus our IT team, based in the US, is working in recoding the different engines in order to allow scalability, and Joseph is also refining the math.
My aim is to have the OnSite tool ready for Q1-Q2 2010. Our first product, NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI), is currently testing and debugging.
The good news is that once NSAI is out there we’ll be able to roll out some other tools based on the same engines as our Sentiment Analysis tool pretty fast as it’s just another *flavor*
In parallel we’re doing some consultancy based on our technology as some companies have asked us help and we go to certain conferences. We are also open to other complimentary actions and this is what I will cover in future posts.
So this was the first post explaining why you should care and where we are. In the coming days/weeks I’ll continue posting in this series, as my purpose is to propose you ways to get involved with this technology.
Here are the topics of the posts I’ve currently drafted:
- NextStage and the future of Web Analytics
- How NextStage can help media buying agencies
- How NextStage can help jobs sites (eg. Monster) and HR departments
So keep visiting.
As always comments and questions are welcome.
Cheers,
René
