Online/offline mesh: The Internet of everything
The low-tech trend that’s transforming what we think a digital product should be
So everyone is talking about the Internet of Things. But why does it just have to be digital things? How about the Internet of… everything?
I’m fascinated by a trend that I like to call online/offline mesh. It’s increasingly all around us — conventional, physical objects given a new relevance by connecting them to the digital world.
The trend was all over SXSW this year and included some unlikely players, most notably 3M, who introduced the Evernote Post-It note to the world. Virtually indistinguishable from its offline brother, the Evernote Post-It is designed specifically for compatibility with Post-It camera on the updated Evernote app.
The color of the Post-It automatically corresponds to certain notebooks — green post-its can be filed under ‘to do’ and red post-its under ‘budget’, for example. So you can scribble down items in the craziness of your day-to-day life, snap them at the end of the day to tidy up your desk and they will be automatically added to your to-do book, accessed wherever you might be working from the next day
At this point you might be asking: why do I care? It’s just a slightly more expensive post-it block, after all. They’ve been around for years.
This is interesting because 3M have taken a successful, if basic, technology (writing a note on a bit of sticky paper) and they’ve brought it into the digital world. This is something developers have been trying to achieve for decades.
Just think about how many notetaking apps humanity has produced over the years — from Notepad on Windows through to Stickies on MacOS, from the countless To Do list apps on iOS through to 3M’s awful and many attempts at creating their own ‘Post It’ app, from the ‘Tasks’ tab added as an afterthought to every e-mail app through to writing Markdown in a tool such as Atom, from the cloud-based Evernote platform through to Microsoft’s rather odd bells-and-whistles attempt to create a notetaking platform called OneNote and charge $100 for it.
All of these apps have never quite cracked the issue. Scribbling something on a bit of paper is just easier than any other input method and better than any digital solution.
Why even try to change it? Instead of creating complexity, let’s embrace the simplicity of basic objects around us. Instead of building an app that we can use to write notes, let’s approach the problem from an entirely different angle and integrate the offline items we know and love with the digital world, enhancing their utility and value.
Similar to the Evernote Post-It is my beloved Evernote Moleskine, the trusty notebook that I have been carrying to client meetings for the past year. I see my Moleskine as indistinguishable to an iPad — the text I write in there is searchable, sendable and permanently archived on the cloud. On top of that, I feel a sense of smug vindication when a client enquires why someone who positions themselves as a tech know-it-all (i.e. me) isn’t taking notes on an iPad. I fire up the Evernote app, show them how my Moleskine syncs to the cloud and suddenly the change the way they see a notebook.
Who needs handwriting recognition when you can just have handwriting?
Very closely related is a new product from a St Louis based start-up called Mod. Even simpler and more beautiful than Moleskine, Mod is anotebook you write in, sketch in, work in… then when it is full, you put it in a mailbox and a week later it is on the cloud. All the contents accessed via an app. Beautifully uncomplicated, taking the best of the offline world and making it a digital product.
Online/offline mesh isn’t just limited to notebooks, of course. It’s a trend that stretches across product categories and underpins some of the most successful tech start-up stories of the past couple of years.
Uber is a great example of a traditional offline business given a new relevance in the tech world. Operating a fleet of cars to take people from A to B is at the heart of Uber’s business model and customer proposition. That business model has been around for decades, evidenced by the minicab offices on every high street in London. But giving those cars a digital presence has really revolutionised the industry.
At Decoded we also exhibit some properties of this trend. Our entire business is facilitated by technology and just like online-only educators, we invest heavily in developing systems to optimize the learning experience our students have. The difference is, students still physically come to our classes — something we believe is vital to achieving results in a short time frame. Most tech companies just see their customers as dots on a google analytics chart — we actually meet them and shake their hands.
A local adtech business in London that really excites me is Blippar. Already enjoying strong distribution in the UK, they’ve opened in New York and are about to go big stateside. Blippar, an augmented reality app, turns symbols in the real world into interactive elements, for example an Oyster card turns into a live status of London Underground tube lines and a dragon tattoo will start breathing fire. I’m excited to see how the technology will be used creatively — their big challenge will be balancing lucrative advertising deals with enabling the developer community to make innovative use of what is a fantastic platform.
Peekster is bringing the concept of online/offline mesh to journalism. As ubiqutous as iPads and Kindles have become, the movement towards e-newspapers and e-magazines has been slow. A combination of insane revenue strategies (I want to buy a copy of the New York Times once every couple of weeks or so — I don’t want a subscription) and the practical reality of where people read periodicals (dentist waiting rooms are going to have paper magazines rather than iPads sitting around) mean phsyical periodicals continue to have inertia.
It makes a lot of sense that physical newspapers and magazines continue to be around— they have a function that their digital equivalents haven’t entirely replaced. But sometimes I wish those offline items just behaved a bit more like their equivalent web site. I want to save some of the articles for future reference, without physically ripping it out of the paper. I want to share articles with other people quickly and easily without needing to find that article online.
Enter Peekster, an app that connects a printed article to the online version of the same story. Genius.
The online/offline mesh trend extends beyond apps and the web — it’s touching e-mail as well. As you might be aware, I despise e-mail and love sending correspondence cards by mail instead. It’s warmer, more personal, more likely to be noticed, and much more likely to be appreciated by the recipient.
Postagram is an app that enables you to send a postcard to someone in the mail as easily as e-mailing a photo to them. That postcard will be pinned to their fridge or stuck on the office wall, whereas the e-mail will be forgotten in the realms of cyber junk.
It should be noted there are a bunch of other bigger and more successful businesses such as Moonpig operating in this e-mail-to-post market, but Postagram have integrated sending physical objects into the iOS ecosystem with beauty and simplicity. All they need to do now is figure out an easy way to get the physical addresses of your iPhone contacts. A partnership with Amazon or other eCommerce giant who could match e-mail addresses to postal addresses would be particularly interesting.
I think we’ve only just scratched the surface of opportunities to bring offline objects into the digital world. The key is not to overthink the transition — all of the successful products above embrace what makes the offline object so successful, instead of trying to reinvent it.
Many tech VCs find it challenging to understand the business model of a tech company that exists in the real world. Certain norms such as scale and narrow gross margins become less irrelevant. But watch this space — I predict the next generation of tech start-up success stories will have one foot in the digital world and the other in the physical world. And they will make a lot of money in the process.
