The decision to connect and remotely monitor products puts a company in sync with the future of information technology. But it raises many other decisions—about product design, business strategy, and new customer relationships.

Some of these decisions will feel strange and new to the leadership of product companies. One of them is about how much human attention and interaction a connected product should require.

Download a printer-friendly PDF version of this essay (100 KB).

This essay is drawn from Harbor’s brand-new study of Pervasive Internet adoption, Connecting to Your Future: The Networking of Every Manufactured Thing.  Download an overview of Connecting to Your Future (PDF, 328 KB).

Download Harbor’s white paper on the Home Awareness market and Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™ system (PDF, 520 KB).

What Is The “Touch Paradigm” of Your Pervasive Internet Offering?
Let’s say you’re a product company, and you’ve just made the momentous decision to enable your wares for remote monitoring in the field.

First of all, good move. Without question, you and the future are now going in the same direction. You’re not alone, but you’re still in the vanguard—which is good, because the early-mover advantages will be enormous if you play your cards right.

By the end of 2005, however, you’ll have plenty of company. For years now, Harbor Research has been predicting a device networking explosion by the middle of this decade. During much of that time, we were nearly alone; today, it’s hard to find anyone who disagrees with that prediction.

Second, what’s your plan, exactly? After making your basic commitment to device connectivity and monitoring, you still have many other decisions to face. Some of those decisions may feel quite new and strange to the leadership of a product company. For starters, how will your new “connected product” change your relationship to your customers, and how will you profit from that change?

In creating your initial business plan, you’ll be thinking about the activities a customer performs with, around, and related to your networked device. You’ll need to try to untether your imagination from your current product and think about the new, connected product. It’s important to go all the way in this thinking.

A crucial early consideration is your customer’s experience of the product’s new capabilities—specifically, the degree of human attention and interaction your Pervasive Internet offering will require.

The “touch paradigm” offers a simple framework that can help you think about this. It’s a conceptual framework that developed with software and the Web, and deals in a general way with how users will expect to interact with an application or an object. Here’s a simple list of basic touch paradigms:

• Lean-Forward. The Web is a lean-forward medium. Users expect to interact with it actively and, for periods of time, almost constantly. They work the Web with their hands almost always on the mouse or keyboard.


• Lean-Back. Like lean-forward, lean-back is an interactive paradigm, but one in which the user expects to be more passive. Television is a lean-back medium. Users may spend a lot of time with it, but even the most aggressive television channel-surfer is still passive when compared to the typical Web surfer. Further, most TV viewers are not relentless remote-control clickers; the medium is designed for close engagement but not for true interactivity.


• Low-Touch. Basic electrical service is low-touch. So is a common wristwatch. The user expects to interact with these things at will, and for the interactions to be extremely simple. The user expects to pay only occasional attention, and to get no big surprises.


• Incidental Contact. People have incidental contact with countless things daily. Each of these things may represent an opportunity to deliver a message to the person, or even to invite a more active kind of interaction. The Pervasive Internet will turn more and more incidental-contact objects into interactive elements in people’s environments. The potential for abuse is enormous, as companies try to turn car dashboards, sidewalks, and the walls of elevators into mock-living entities inviting attention and interaction. Eventually, some equilibrium will be reached, but where? Most people have some capacity to enjoy Alice’s experience in Wonderland, where edibles (or are they?) blow trumpets and wave signs saying “Eat me.” But how much is too much?


• Alert-Based. There are objects in people’s lives that they want to hear from only if something is wrong. You want your monoxide or smoke detector to reliably report danger, and otherwise you don’t even want to know it’s there. Many consumers of uninterrupted power-supply (UPS) systems, for example, are getting no value because their batteries are dead and they don't know it. This reminds us that there is real opportunity in making alert-based systems reliable. But companies should beware of trying to stretch them to another paradigm by making them pointlessly intrusive. We really don’t want to hear from our monoxide alarm if there is no monoxide.


• No-Touch. There are systems working for us that we don’t want to know about at all, and the Pervasive Internet will enable and intensify the value of many such systems. A single example is power quality. Dozens of devices may be involved in ensuring that our voltage and power factor remain constant. To do this effectively, they may need to talk to each other, but we don’t want them to talk to us.

Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™: Just Enough Touch
A forthcoming “home awareness” system called HomeHeartbeat™, from the Residential Product Division of Eaton’s Electrical Business, is an excellent example of a networked product conceived with the proper touch-factor. For years, the most popular visions of the “smart home” involved a very intrusive, high-touch paradigm: all the “automated servants” talked and flashed, and delivered their value, it seemed, by demanding a great deal of human attention. They all talked and flashed at you.

By contrast, Eaton correctly saw that the home appliances and systems that people want to monitor and control tend to be low-touch or alert-based, and that the human-facing components should reflect this. Eaton’s Home Key™, the piece of the system directly used by the consumer, was carefully designed to be a simple, low-touch device that is there when you need it, elegant and unobtrusive.

MAYA Design, Inc., the designers of HomeHeartbeat™, have a whimsical term for the very important challenge of getting a product’s usability and complexity “just right”—The Goldilocks Principle.

Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™ is a good example of a Pervasive Internet offering in the home/consumer venue. Harbor Research has long used the term “Pervasive Internet” because, ultimately, the protocols of the Internet will be the unifying element of networked pervasive computing worldwide.

However, many early pervasive products will use a variety of networking techniques until TCP/IP-based device networking becomes commonplace. HomeHeartbeat™ is also an example of this. When it is launched in early 2005, the system will use a pager network; later in the year, HomeHeartbeat™ will be extended to use the Internet itself. (Download Harbor Research’s white paper on the Home Awareness market and Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™—PDF, 520 KB.)

A Few Other Interface Considerations
Touch paradigm is a high-level construct that will help prevent errors in application design. For those applications that are privileged to have a human interface, such things are so important that a few additional notes are worthwhile. Harbor has found five suggestions to be helpful in many situations:

1. Create as few interfaces as possible.


2. If there are discrete user groups having different interface needs but the same touch paradigm, consider making one interface a user-sensitive superset of the other. Reuse code and data as much as possible.


3. Be very aware of what each user group does not need or want to see.


4. Be very wary of intruding on the customer or user’s awareness for marketing reasons unless there is a very clear imperative and objective. Have a bias toward minimizing touch and visibility if your application is not oriented toward learning or entertainment.


5. Use your own hardware platform if it is feasible. Your application gets lost if it is based on a multi-use platform such as a cell phone, PDA, or PC. However, there’s also no excuse for making the user carry another device if one of those multi-use devices is truly well-suited to the need.

In future issues of “Currents” we’ll discuss other aspects of Pervasive Internet strategy drawn from our new landmark study Connecting to Your Future: The Networking of Every Manufactured Thing.

Download a printer-friendly PDF version of this essay (100 KB).

This essay is drawn from Harbor’s brand-new study of Pervasive Internet adoption, Connecting to Your Future: The Networking of Every Manufactured Thing.  Download an overview of Connecting to Your Future (PDF, 328 KB).

Download Harbor’s white paper on the Home Awareness market and Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™ system (PDF, 520 KB).

Harbor Research welcomes your feedback. Send it to feedback@harborresearch.com.

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http://harborresearch.com/currents/.

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Who We Are and What We Offer
New! Harbor Pervasive Internet Briefing Service
First, a few words about our latest offering, which is a unique and efficient way to harness the resources of Harbor Research: The Pervasive Internet Briefing Service. This annual package delivers outstanding business intelligence value by combining all points of contact to Harbor:

• Quarterly in-person briefings on subjects of your choosing


• All Harbor publications for a year


• Department- or business unit-wide access to Harbor SmartSphere® online tracking projects


• Phone and email access to analysts

Download a brochure on the Pervasive Internet Briefing Service (PDF, 500 KB).

Founded in 1983, Harbor Research Inc. has more than twenty years of experience in providing strategic consulting and research services that enable our clients to understand and capitalize on emergent and disruptive opportunities in high technology, Harbor Research’s clients are leaders in communications, computing, control, and content. Harbor Research has built extended relationships with larger multi-line companies including AT&T, ABB, General Electric, Danaher, Eaton, Emerson, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Hughes, IBM, Intel, Invensys, Lucent, Motorola, Rockwell, Siemens, and Texas Instruments, as well as with growth companies such as EMC, Cadence Design, Conexant, Qualcomm, and PTC.

We also work with a broad array of emergent start-ups and pre-IPO technology ventures. We have built relationships with a number of significant Pervasive Internet players, including Questra Corporation, Xsilogy, DataSweep, eDevice, Wireless Innovation, and emWare, to name a few.

We provide studies, workshops, briefings, research retainers, and consulting engagements of uniquely high value to both technology suppliers and adopters. For more information, please contact us.

Harbor’s new online platform for research services offers continually updated intelligence and stunning data-visualization.

Static, printed reports can’t track the complex ecosystems and warp-speed pace of high tech. SmartSphere® projects can.

The brains of the Web. The brawn of server databases. The beauty of a CD-ROM.
For nearly ten years, we’ve been waiting for Web media to get good enough to let us do this. It’s finally here. Harbor SmartSphere® re-invents the whole concept of delivering research value. It’s to business research what the Pervasive Internet will be to business itself: a huge injection of dynamic intelligence and sheer voltage. SmartSphere® is online, interactive, dynamic, and visualized. There’s nothing static, rigid, or dead about it. Eventually, we at Harbor will do everything in SmartSphere® that we used to do on paper, and we’ll do it better. And you can, too. in a custom-configured project of your own, SmartSphere® can be anything you want it to be.

And yes, you can get printed reports. We’ve re-invented those, too. Not fixed, one-size-fits-all printed reports, but custom printed reports that you configure and SmartSphere® creates for you on the fly in PDF format.

See SmartSphere® and find out more right now:

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. So what are they worth if they’re pictures of your whole world, and you can fly around inside the pictures with your mouse?
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).

A small portion of an interactive Harbor SphereMap™. This one portrays a company’s world. You “fly around” the map by dragging it with your mouse, bringing into focus any area you want to explore. You see a company’s peers, investors, products, and alliance-structure at a glance. Clicking nodes fetches additional information from the database. Shift-clicking nodes creates new maps of other companies—and maps of markets, too.

Projects, projects, projects. Ours, and yours.
SmartSphere® is an online platform that Harbor uses to deliver Web-based services. You don’t buy SmartSphere® the way you buy a program for your computer. You buy access to one or more SmartSphere® projects. We define projects of our own on important high-tech subjects, and clients can subscribe to those projects. Clients can also define their own custom (and completely private) projects.

SmartSphere® projects are laser-focused on their subjects. No waste, no fluff, no irrelevance. A SmartSphere® project delivers continually updated information on whatever the project has been defined to track. Some of that information is created in the good old-fashioned way, by experienced researchers and analysts. And some of it is created with 21^st century tools like automated news feeds and Web-based info services. Every time you log in to a project, there’s new information—freshly tracked events, new company alliances, new company and market comparisons, enhanced company, market, and technology profiles, and insightful Harbor commentary and analysis.

When you visit our SmartSphere® demonstration, you’ll see a limited version of our own “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project. Bear in mind that the free demo offers limited information and functionality. The full “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project, for example, was created to replace and improve our own earlier online publication, Pervasive Internet Report.

Custom SmartSphere® projects. Your secret weapon has arrived.
You’ve heard about some of our SmartSphere® projects. Now let’s talk about yours. Does your company have business development, M&A, R&D, or sales and marketing goals? We hope the answer is yes. How would you like “living business intelligence”™ on the companies that interest or worry you? Or on the markets and technologies that are defining your future? A custom SmartSphere® project is the perfect way to do that. “Living business intelligence”™ means research that is laser-focused on your targets, and continually updated for as long as you need it.

Any collection of companies, markets, or technologies can become the backbone of a SmartSphere® project. You define who or what they are. You define what you want to track about them, and how you’d like to rank or score or weight them. You define the types of cross-company or cross-market comparisons you’d like to see.

Take action and take control.
If you’ve read this much about SmartSphere® without clicking something, it’s time to click. Here are those links once again.

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration.
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).