So it’s been a while since we last wrote an article for our blog. It seemed we were quite busy finishing up projects just before summer season and then we took off taking holidays. Hiking the Spanish Pyrenees and chilling out around the Med has cleared our minds and sparked us with new energy. Now that we are back at the office it’s time for an update from our creative HQ.

From now on we hope to increase the amount of posts on this blog. We see a lot of things happening around the Internet of Things lately. We will try to keep you up to date with all the new innovations as much as we can. Also expect more Tweets around the subject.

Also, we are very happy with the Booreiland Invites column we’ve fired up and we will continue asking interesting people to write about their fields of expertise and how they are affected by the rise of Meta Products. Their articles will inspire us and hopefully you too.

Thanks to ms. Sara Córdoba, who we’ve had around in the studio for the past months, I guess we’ve finally constructed an approach for actually designing Meta Products. All is summarized in her graduation report The Value and Meaning of Meta Products, and we will post short excerpts from the report here during the upcoming months. Luckily for us, Sara will stay with us and help us grow our business.

Then there is our upcoming book, Meta Products – Building The Internet of Things. Initially, this blog was partly launched as a place to store content for the book. But now the time has come to really pick up the pen and start filling in those white pages, not in the least because our publisher would really appreciate it if the book could be published during spring 2011. With autumn on the doorstep we should really take off as soon as possible with this ambitious project.

We’re really looking forward to dive into business life again and connect with new interesting people. If you feel like having a cup of coffee with us, simply drop us a note. By the way, I also believe we’re planning to host a party somewhere in autumn, but so far that’s just rumours…

As for now, I wish you all a very inspiring and flourishing autumn!

M.

1—Sensing wearables

photo by Alper Çuğun (illustrir) CC 2010

This field consists of wearable devices that measure characteristics of the human body and/or the environment by means of sensors. The accompanying web part often consists of data visualisation and analysis of what has been measured.

Examples: Eco Sensor, Fitbit, Nike+, Rationalizer, Switch2Health

2—Ambient intelligence

Intelligent systems that operate in the background (therefore being ambient) within an environment without people noticing it. These systems often consist of multiple sensors and actuators communicating with each other.

Example: Smart Home

3—Ubimedia

The world of Ubimedia is all about tagged objects, mostly by means of RFID-tags, AR-tags or QR-codes. Readers must be used to retrieve the information within the tags. These readers can be mobile phones, RFID readers etc. The information that’s being retrieved is mostly URLs, linking to rich internet content.

Examples: Skål

4—Identification

Retrieving the identity of an object (think of packages in mailing logistics) is increasingly done with the help of web databases. Mostly through RFID-tags an object is scanned and matched with an online database to retrieve its identity. A spin-off group of this field consists of so-called ‘digital business cards’. They swap contact information and identities of social accounts between persons.

Examples: Poken, My Name is E

5—Navigation & location

Navigating while on the road involves GPS and physical interfaces for pinpointing your location. Dynamic information such as traffic info is downloaded directly from the web, which makes these systems true Meta Products.

Examples: TomTom

6—Monitoring & tracking

Monitoring and tracking systems often consist of a combination of sensors that measure the condition or the state of certain objects. The results are uploaded and plotted in a web interface. Much like the sensing wearables, but instead, these systems focus not so much on the human body, but moreover on objects and their environments.

Examples: eco:Drive, SenseAware

7—Toys & games

An evergrowing group in Meta land is the one of toys and games. Combining physical products with the web in whatever kind of way seems to open up great opportunities for both toys and games.

Examples: AR.Drone, Nabaztag, Siftables, SmartUs, Social Mutator, Webkinz

As explained earlier, Meta Products consist of both a physical part and a web part. Together they make up the total product experience. Therefore we can learn from the applied business models of both 20th century consumer products and 21st century web services.

First, let’s state the most common business models around physical products:

1. Selling the actual atoms
For most products, consumers simply pay for the atoms themselves. They pay for the materials, the production and assembly processes, the distribution, and the extra margins put above production prices depending on the kind of brand they’re buying from.

2. Selling products on loan
In some cases, businesses are selling products on basis of loans. Especially in case of large purchases, like buying a car, businesses tend to offer loans to consumers. In this way consumers are given the opportunity to pay back their purchase over time, instead of buying at once (of course with a certain amount of interest).

3. Selling subscriptions
Some markets, like the magazine and newspaper market, are mostly subscription based. People can subscribe to a certain amount of items or a timespan in which they can make use of a product.

4. Giving away products for free
Businesses are giving away their products for free more than we might think. In most of these cases advertising is covering the costs to produce and distribute these products. Think of many free magazines where advertisers indirectly pay for all the costs. This is called the 3-party market (producer, advertiser and consumer).

Now, let’s see which business models are often applied for web services:

1. Selling licences
Most software is being sold licence based. Consumers pay for a certain version which they can download after purchase or get delivered on DVD by mail.

2. Selling subscriptions
Like physical products, web services are often sold via subscriptions. Think of your hosting service: you probably pay an annual fee to get your website hosted.

3. Giving away web services for free
There is an extremely large group of web services offering their service completely for free, and this group is increasing everyday. There are several models to keep these businesses alive:
- Advertising: let advertisers pay for access to an audience who in return pay nothing for the service itself.
- Merchandising: offer merchandising around the involved free web service.
- Freemium: offer a free basic version of the web service, and sell a premium one that has more features. Many iPhone apps work this way.
- Donations: give consumers the choice whether they would like to give a donation for the service they use.
- Offer the complete service for sale: launch and grow a web service until it’s big enough to sell to a web mammoth such as Google or Yahoo. In the meantime consumers have been using the service for free. YouTube did it, amongst many others.

Well now, for Meta Products, consisting of both a web and physical part, you can play and mix with the above stated business models. Most likely you will be selling the physical product and giving away the web service. This is because people are used to buying real stuff, while they are expecting web services to be free. Nabaztag, Nike+ and Poken are all examples of selling the atoms and giving away free bits on the web. However, it gets even more interesting when you sell the physical product, give away a basic web service that makes the product work, and then offer a premium web service on top of that, which expands the total product experience.

What’s for sure, is that the web forces businesses to create great new (consumer friendly) business models everyday, and Meta Products can benefit from that!

I hardly read my newspaper anymore. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still subscribed. But then I remember the comfortable experience that comes with it. Grabbing the paper from the doormat, noticing it’s totally soaked from the rain outside (I live in The Netherlands, one soaky country). And then, the experience gets completed by dropping myself on the couch, browsing the enormous sheets, while wetting my fingers to optimally turn the pages. Some relaxation!

But how come I (and many others with me) don’t get to do this ritual anymore? Finding the time of course is part of the problem, but there’s a bigger part, which deals with the fact that it’s just static information you’re reading. It’s already outdated from the moment it is being printed. Furthermore, I can’t interact with the information, I can’t click on keywords I want to know more about, I can’t filter on subjects, it is still just ink on paper.

During the day I receive RSS feeds from the web on the kind of news I’m interested in. It’s instant and often free. Next to that, I follow some people I’m interested in on Twitter. They get me the news I want. But often, this results in an overload of information of relatively poor quality. Besides, reading big articles from the screen just doesn’t do the job. It’s nothing like the real thing, it is still just pixels on a screen.

I’d like to have the best of both worlds: dynamic, interactive and filtered news on real paper for that special moment in the evening. I will subscribe myself to The Daily Meta Paper.

In this context, we will kick off a student project, called Nieuwsbeleving, which is about innovation in the newspaper business. The project starts on november 23rd. We’re organizing this project with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Students from Innovation Management will look at the subject from a technological point of view and hopefully will come up with innovative solutions on both product and service level. If you like, you can also follow Niewsbeleving on Twitter.

Class 1

With many Meta Products the information flows from a physical, web connected product to an online interface (pictured above). This is the case with Nike+, where the combination of sensor and iPod/iPhone counts as the physical part, and the Nike+ website counts as the online interface. With these types of products the physical part often functions as a sensorial input, whereas the online interface plots the results of this sensorial input. Besides Nike+, a Meta Product like SmartUs follows the same principle.

Class 2

Some Meta Products of the kind as described in Class 1, need some intermediate hardware device to serve as a hub between the physical product and the online interface (pictured above). The reason for this lies in the fact that the initial product cannot establish an internet connection on its own and so it cannot upload information to the online interface. Most of these products connect to a computer through USB, after which the computer uploads the information. Examples of this information flow are Fiat eco:Drive, Poken and our own project Social Mutator.

Class 3

Then there is a different group where the information flows in the exact opposite direction, from online interface to physical product (pictured above). Take the Olinda radio for example, which sends the musical taste of your online social network to a physical radio as streamed music. Now suddenly the online part serves as the input, whereas the product functions as an actuator (playing songs). Besides Olinda, Nabaztag is a good example of this information flow.

Class 4

Classes 1 and 3 can also be combined, resulting in an information stream that flows from a physical product via an online server all the way to another physical product (pictured above). Many devices work this way, in which the online server merely functions as a forwarding system. One of the oldest examples is the telephone, where a voice signal is being forwarded by a telephone company to the other end of the line. Devices using the web as their communication medium can have a far richer information stream than just voice signals. Nabaztag and Olinda can also operate this way, when friends interact with each other through these Meta Products.

Class 5

Finally, at the borders of Meta there is a group of products that have no direct information flow between physical product and online interface (pictured above). However, some sort of connection is made between these parts. An example is Webkinz, where a consumer gets a secret code with every pet he or she buys, enabling him or her to unlock a digital pet in the online part. You could question whether this is really Meta, since there is no information flow whatsoever. What’s for sure though is that the online part adds to the total product experience, which makes you reconsider what the boundaries of a consumer product are.

Which classes are the most fruitful for future markets is still unclear. Trends however seem to go in the direction where web connected products communicate with each other directly through an online server (Class 4). Let’s see how it evolves!

Recent trends and innovations all point in the same direction, which is the exact opposite of mass production (The Long Tail). Here’s an example that illustrates what I mean: in a few years people will be able to produce and replace certain broken parts in their coffee machine themselves, simply by downloading a CAD-file, which they’ve paid for, and printing it with their own affordable 3D-printer. No mass production whatsoever is involved here!

In these cases the ON-OFF connection will become more and more important, since the web is the most flexible platform you can think of. It can help people with designing, customizing and even building their own products. So start designing for flexibility, start designing for the web, start designing Meta Products!

1. You cannot ignore them. The human body is simply programmed to respond to bright colored, eye catching objects entering our personal space. So in a way, advertisers are simply forcing you to give them your attention. I think you should be able to decide for yourself whether you want to or not.

2. They pollute the city landscape. Buildings are filled with 23 feet high neon lighted attention grabbers. Instead of making a symbiosis between ad and building, advertisers do their utmost best to differentiate as much as they can from the context in which the ad is placed. Seriously, there are other ways to stand out.

3. They cost a lot of energy. Whether ads are put on paper or on neon signs, a lot of power is needed to produce and distribute them.

Having this in mind, I wondered how all this would look like when augmented reality sets in on a large scale. Just aim with your whatever-kind-of-connected-meta-device at the urban landscape and see advertisements pop up. You can filter if you want to, geo-tag locations or do whatever you want with the information. And the best thing is: you’re disturbing no one! City landscapes could be cleaned up, printers could stop polluting, but most importantly: you could ask for ads when you want to. Advertisers on the other hand will have an easier job getting your attention, since you were the one who requested the information in the first place and so your mind is already receptive for advertising.

Sure, as an advertiser you’ll have to take one step back while waiting for consumers until they request ads, but in return you’ll have a highly interested target group willing to learn more about your product.

Back in Amsterdam, one of my partners at Booreiland had been having a conversation over dinner with some of his friends. He talked about our backgrounds in industrial design engineering and artificial intelligence, and also about wanting to do something more with those expertises. So far, Booreiland had been a web and graphic design company. One of the people at that dinner, whose name I can’t recall, pitched my partner the idea of combining product design with the web. He said, if you could somehow hook up products to the web, that would result in consumer products with amazing new functionalities, incorporating the best of both worlds.

Back in the studio he told us about this new opportunity. It sounded like a great idea, but how do we do this? How do we find the right team? Where to find leads? Are there any examples out there yet? Of course there were… Nike+! Nike, together with Apple, had succeeded in combining the offline world (running shoes) with the online world (community platform). With this in mind, we realized the web could become so much more meaningful. At the same time, our mission at Booreiland would become so much more meaningful as well. It seemed the right combination of what we’d been taught back at college (product design and AI) and our experiences with web design at Booreiland. New vision, new mission, new challenges!