Integration Capability is the Winning ‘Gene’ in Technology Evolution

We were recently involved in a pitch to a hotel for an in-room entertainment system that went from straight forward to utterly confusing within two rounds of presentations and demonstrations by all invited vendor parties which ended up paralysing the hotel’s decision making process. What happened? The short answer is: technology chaos.

The problem hoteliers are facing is how to make sense of a today’s Information Systems which are increasingly a chaotic mix of applications, interfaces and operating systems with their respective advantages and disadvantages and are by no means compatible. So which one to go for? Which one is flexible enough to serve hotels’ increasingly complex and continuously changing operating environments?

The answer is surprisingly easy to find with a little research around current mainstream technologies.  But in order to do that, let’s define what mainstream is first: in short, it’s integration capability that results in mass adoption. Similar to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, a technology’s trajectory is largely determined by how much it is able to adapt to changing circumstances, or in other words, its capability to integrate with new and improved technology variations as they appear.

Pushed to the sidelines: Betamax

Of course, technology is not some organism and moves in much faster and more haphazard ways as everyone who remembers the Beta vs VHS technology battle can attest. It can be wholly unpredictable at the cutting edge – think the phenomenal and utterly unpredicted success of the iPad – and entirely predictable at the tail end of consumer adoption (anyone doubted the success of iPad 2 and 3?).

Which brings us back to how we should determine what is and isn’t mainstream technology. There are two parts here that need to work in sync: the front end, or user interface, and the backend, or operating system. And looking at adoption levels of both gives a pretty good insight into what ‘mainstream’ constitutes at this point in time.

At the user interface, the performance of tasks is commonly managed by application software. While application software has always been the link between the operating system and the user (think accounting software, office suites, graphics software etc), it’s mobile Apps that really changed everything. And when Apple opened its platform for app developers and then the AppStore to help iPhone users turn their phone into a mini computer full of apps, that’s when the platform truly became mainstream. Now, as Apple says so aptly on their website, there’s an app for everything. Apple’s application store sells the most apps (not a shocker), carrying over 225,000, with more than 4 billion apps downloaded from Apple alone (the second largest app market – Google’s – doesn’t release comparable figures).

So here it is then: the more open for integration the platform, the more app developers it will attract, which in turn will draw more people to buy the mobile device running that particular platform. The future winners of the technology evolution are likely to be decided by just this openness of integration.  That’s what’s called mainstream.

Looking at the current canon of technologies that are dominating the enterprise and consumer landscapes, Android and Apple, or iOS, appear to be winning the race to becoming the dominant system operating technology standard, specifically for mobile devices, which are increasingly dominating all walks of life.

All of this also matters to hotels of course. Technology as a whole is increasingly pivotal for hotels on all levels, from interior room design to revenue management, so betting on the wrong technology horse may result in some nasty injuries later.

As an example, let’s look at some technologies that are commonly going head to head in in-room technology systems these days: STB-based systems, and those based on thin client-integrated technologies such as XBMC.

If you apply the mainstream test to both, it’s pretty clear that STB is as bona fide mainstream as you can get. XBMC, on the other hand, is a niche product that is used by a handful of customers, has very limited integration compatibility and is consequently very likely to have a finite development path. The latest STBs today are typically based on an HTML5 front end client. XBMC on the other hand is based on their own proprietary thin client, which provides an optimised front end performance but at the considerable price of integration and customisation flexibility. And as STB performance improves, even the front end performance advantage of a thin client will vanish. 

Say hello and wave goodbye: HTML5 has regaled Flash to history

The fact that Adobe sacrificed Flash for HTML5 is an early indicator that HTML5 will prevail and push most others (including XBMC) that have a boutique ecosystem to support its ongoing evolution to the sidelines.

While the current chaos of technology advancements makes it considerably harder than just a few years ago to predict what the next breakthrough consumer device, entertainment delivery platform or social obsession will be, it is clear that for the foreseeable future the delivery mode will be Apps, based on open technologies and accepted by the mass market. So hotels should ensure they decide on a platform that meets these attributes.

The Limits of Using Icons as a Visual Vocabulary

It was just the other day when we looked at coming up with a new set of Icons for our in-room entertainment Graphic User Interface that it occurred to us that while the various technology devices that anchor our lives these days allow us to communicate ever more visually, our collective reference points are more and more fragmented. From the old Egyptians and their hieroglyphs to today’s Apps, mankind has always sought to use pictorial descriptions to communicate. When you study for your drivers licence, you have to memorise the look and meaning of as many road signs as possible in order to pass the test. In order to make it easier, the road authorities around the world came up with pictorial representations of the various signs which over the years were adopted more or less universally in the developed world. But while learning the meaning of these signs came with a clear incentive – i.e. learn them or don’t drive – the visual identifiers and pictorials that guide so many other things in life evolved much more haphazardly.

The windows approach to computing was probably a major milestone for making icons a centre piece of way finding in our daily lives. In the early days of the desktop computing age, these icons were necessarily simple, but not only because of the graphic restrictions, but because of the need for a simple conduit into a complex world that would be understood by the most technically inept person. The artist who created the icons for the original Mac desktop and applications believed that icons should work like traffic signs and convey information without distracting the user. So born was the ‘folder’ icon with the little stub poking out that looked exactly like the ones stacked in everyone’s office desk, alongside the ‘recycle bin’ that looked like Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, the pair of scissors that signaled that you were about to ‘cut’ something and a paperclip that meant you were ‘attaching’ a document. Then, when the internet came of age, the depiction of a neat little house with a chimney wasn’t an advertisement for a furniture shop anymore, but the icon that signified the homepage of an internet site. All of this is of course common sense and has largely managed to align most of us along one common path of iconography that enables us to recognise that a shopping cart icon means “check out” a pad lock means “security” and an umbrella has something to do with the weather.

However, what happens when the corresponding physical object has no longer any distinguishing features that are so important for being both instantly identifiable and minimally distracting? Or what if the activity it is meant to represent becomes too complex for a clear pictorial representation? A house is a house is a house is a home – ok. But take out your mobile phone and look at the symbols on the buttons for making a call and ending a call. It’s the old fashioned banana-shaped head set that was part of the home phone before it was replaced with a very different looking hands free set or a mobile phone. Or try saving something on your computer and you’ll see that this action to this date is symbolized by a floppy disc, something that joined the technology scrap heap more than 15 years ago as other portable storage options such as CD-ROM took over.

But it was when I was sitting with my graphics team to ponder a new set of icons for the User Interface of our in-room entertainment system that it really hit me how little the pictorial representation of our world has changed in the face of the relentless evolution of our communications world. How better to represent TV channels than a box with the old rabbit ears on top? And nothing says “movie” better and clearer than the old 35mm movie reel, even though today’s box offices smashes are more likely a combination of digital video and CGI. Music channels are much better represented by a full blown stereo headset rather than the now more prevalent micro earpieces. And what says better “you’ve got mail” than a good old fashioned letter envelope? It will be interesting to see if these ‘old’ pictorials finally disappear simply because a new generation of users has no longer any memory of them ever being in existence. But what will replace them? The problem is that as the physical part of human interaction and communication gets more complex, so by necessity does the iconography. What was once a clearly defined activity, such as “I watch TV”, has morphed into “I Skype my friend on my connected TV”. “I read the news in the paper” is now more likely to be “I read the news on my smart phone”. The question is at what point finding a universal visual vocabulary for ever complex activities becomes futile. Some icons will move into the abstract space where the meaning is instilled through what is commonly known as branding. We can already see this with Facebook, Skype and Twitter, whose logos have effectively turned into icons describing an activity.

But what about the so-called ‘way finding’ icons? At the risk of sounding a little nostalgic, my bet is that while newspapers may go completely digital and TV’s become multifunctional communication devices, their original form and purpose will live on in the world of icons for generations to come. And as for our User interface? In the end we decided to do a combo of words and icons. Nothing beats a good compromise.  

The Pros and Cons of using Apple products in hotels

While using Apple devices at the consumer facing front end is a smart choice for hotels, using them at the back end is expensive and potentially risky

The trouble with a new technology all of a sudden gaining momentum is that there is a lot of enthusiasm and eagerness that lets many people race ahead without assessing the pros and cons first. This is particularly so when it involves popular gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad, which have recently graduated from personal communication and entertainment devices to all round marketing device for hotels.  

Apple is of course a unique success story and we stand in awe in front of Steve Jobs who not only came back to turn the company around after years in the wilderness, but moved on to single handedly revolutionise the way we consume media today. Apple consumer products come with a beautiful, minimalistic design, superior functionality and a seemingly impenetrable cool factor that is streets ahead of its competitors. But aside from the iPod, Pad and Phone, Apple also sells computer software and hardware which includes the Mac Mini, a sub-desktop computer and server which enjoys popularity for its small form factor and light weight compared to regular desktop PCs and has become specifically popular for use as a server in a small network and, due to its sleek design, as a home theater solution.

But things get blurred when it comes to using Apple products in a commercial environment, for example to power the in-room entertainment services in a hotel. In fact, the understandable aim to catch the rays from the All-Things-Apple sun could put hotels in danger of falling into an IT trap that will, at best, cost them a lot of money to implement and at worst severely limit its possibilities to migrate to future technologies. Aside from limiting itself and its travelers to Apple products and updates for the coming years, the investment hotels have to fork out for an all-Apple hotel is staggering. Given the strict regulation Apple imposes on distributor, reseller and end user pricing, there isn’t much room for Systems Integrators or hotels to receive a better discount. So equipping all rooms in a 300-key hotel plus headend with MacMinis is quite an investment, even if the integrator gets a good discount of the list price of roughly US$700 a piece. The cost of the MacMini of course reflects that this is a piece of hardware that was primarily designed as a consumer device, and not for commercial use.  

Don’t get me wrong: I think Apple devices are extremely useful in a service environment such as a hotel, particularly at the consumer facing front end. The ‘Second Screen’ entertainment solution my company offers for hotels is tremendously popular as it lets customers stream live TV and VoD content on their iPad or iPhone wherever they are in the hotel, access facilities and room service info and use it as a navigation tool to facilitate eCommerce applications. But you don’t have to have a MacMini in each room to facilitate these services; there are more robust options in the market that are also easily upgradeable and do not limit accessibility to a certain brand. And they are considerably cheaper, probably as much as 60% compared to an all-Apple solution. Count on top of that the direct and indirect cost incurred by the ongoing maintenance of a PC/MAC in a hotel room and you end up with a price that is way beyond what’s justifiable. 

If significant cost savings are not enough, consider latest figures showing that popularity of Android-based tablets has risen from 13% to 46% in the 6 months from November 2010 to April 2011 which indicates that the race to tablet dominance is far from decided. Just remember that just 2 short years ago the tablet market did not exist and you can literally hear the next ‘big thing’ snapping at every gadget’s feet. Another point to note is Connected TVs, which will significantly impact the hotel industry in the medium to long term and will further erode the window of opportunity for a MacMini solution in a commercial environment like a hotel, at least at the current price point.

Hotels have to seriously look at the consequences of exposing themselves to these potential risks. So rather than following short lived trends and marketing gains, they should carefully assess the cost and long term viability of their IT investment to ensure they can implement changes and additions to their core services easily and with minimal investment.