Cycling, Property and the Digital Layer

Over and over again I’ve been banging on* about how important it is for the property industry to embrace modern technology. In particular I’ve talked about social media, location services, big data, the cloud and the internet of things. Often this has led to a degree of bafflement as in the abstract these things can be hard to get to grips with. Well, here’s a real world example to ponder.

And it involves the humble bicycle, much loved by property folk. Which is appropriate, as with the bicycle we can see how the physical and digital worlds are colliding. To everyone’s benefit.

How so?

Well first off you have your bike. And once you get started you find yourself drifting into ‘Planet Cyclist’ and before you know it you join a cycling club. And then your competitive edge kicks in and you sign up for an online club like Strava. And this allows you to track all your rides through GPS, and plot them all on real time maps (location services). And then you start to share and compare these with other Strava members (social media). And you do all this via an app on your phone (pulling data from the Cloud).

Without thinking much about it you’ve plugged yourself into an extraordinary digital network meshing together vast pools of information (big data) and massive computational grunt. You are now a digital human. And all you did was buy a bicycle.

In London you also use a Boris bike. And this tracks you via RFID (Internet of things) in order to keep track of the four thousand or so bikes whizzing hither and thither.

If you were visiting the Intel campus in Oregon you might even have seen the prototype Internet of Things enabled bikes they are developing.

So far this is all about you, your bike and your social network. But** with all this technology going on something else is possible, with much wider ramifications. By pooling all the data generated by the whole Strava community they now have access to exceptional insight into how cyclists move around various world cities, something which was never before possible. So they are now selling this data to City Planners, whose job is making a city more manageable and who need all the data they can get their hands on.

Starting off in Portland Oregon, London, Glasgow and Orlando have also signed up. The image at the top of the page is taken from the heatmap of their dataset which includes 77,688,848 rides and 19,660,163 runs representing about 220 billion total data points.

So there you have it. Social media, location services, big data, the Cloud and the internet of things working in real life. The Digital Layer in action.

And the big takeaway from this? The Digital Layer is rich, and thick, and with us now. It can transform everything from the daily life of an individual right up to the workings of our smart cities.

What can it do for your property? How can it excite, inspire and inform occupiers of your space or visitors to your estate?

Antony

* A phrase first used by the way in an advertisement in Punch in April 1936

** I often wonder whether it is acceptable to start a sentence with a conjunction. Seems it is.

Is the Property world getting 'a sense of place' all wrong?

April 2014

I’ve been reading the online summary of the ‘How to develop a socially productive place’ conference held at the RSA and sponsored by British Land on the 2nd of April.

And you know what? I think the property world has got ‘a sense of place’ all wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but distinctly out of date. Whilst the conference contained much of interest there was, as far as I could see, no mention at all of technology and the digital world we now live in. You’ve probably seen the image below but the property world seems to be stuck very much in the 2005 mindset:

In 2005 there were no smartphones and consequently one’s experience of the space around us was purely connected to the physical environment. In this case it was the inauguration of the Pope. Eight years later smartphones are everywhere and with us at all times. Our experience of the space around us is now as heavily influenced by that computer in our pocket as the physical environment we find ourselves in.

People want information, especially local, in the palm of their hand, and physical space has a past, a present and a future. The digital layer is about unlocking this content.

• I am here
• What’s going on?
• What happened here?
• What’s going to happen here?
• Are my friends here?
• What did they like?
• What should I do now?

It’s the smartphone that will determine how ‘a sense of place’ is experienced. Think about the questions above; they cover the variables that determine how successful a place is. At the human level, they are what all of us want to know. The place that helps us answer these questions will be successful. The place that informs, inspires and excites us will prosper.

Socially productive places will embrace this digital layer. And if they don’t then they will not be fit for purpose. You can talk all you like about mixed uses, high quality architecture, good urban design and sustainability (and the conference did) but if you do not expose the digital layer then your place is stuck in the past.

The property world needs to take technology seriously and accept that the physical and digital worlds have collided and are now one and the same. To discuss one without the other is a dead end.

You will not create socially productive places without getting the digital layer right. And that involves a lot more than just installing decent wifi. You need to understand how the internet of things, cloud computing, social, contextual and mobile technologies will effect how people work, rest and play. All of these will form part of creating a smart city, and the future of socially productive places rests within smart cities.

The world has fundamentally changed since 2005. And the way we think needs to change with it.

Who’s in?

Antony

Hey! You! Get on to my cloud.

March 2014

Well it looks like the time to prevaricate is over. Now that Microsoft have, at last, produced a version of Office for the iPad, you can be sure that The Cloud has well and truly arrived. Locally hosted software, be it programs loaded on to your PC or laptop, or hosted on servers in your office is now decidedly passe. Relics of the last century, of old world thinking, they represent a way of operating a business that is now dying fast. Besides going mobile Microsoft, under their new boss Satya Nadella, is even moving to a post windows world; their business-centric cloud based operating system Windows Azure is to be renamed Microsoft Azure.

Make no mistake that renaming is a HUGE thing. Under Steve Ballmer Microsoft was totally focused on windows, arguably helping them miss just about every big new trend in tech over the last ten years. By moving beyond windows Nadella is signalling a major shift. and that shift is up into The Cloud.

And if Microsoft move beyond windows and focus on The Cloud then sure as eggs is eggs that is where business IT will be going.

And that is a great thing, as finally business might en masse break with the comfort blanket of old tech and embrace the future. For this future offers so much potential for huge leaps in productivity as well as signalling the onslaught of some truly disruptive technologies. And disruption, whilst occasionally terrifying, heralds a better world; one where the advances in computing open up countless opportunities. Technologies that will transform healthcare, enable cities to work more efficiently and environmentally to the benefit of all of us, give people access to unparallelled services tailored precisely to their desires, redefine politics to allow true and widespread engagement with the populace, and finally end the scourge of third world disease. Just for starters:)

We are entering ‘The Second Machine Age’ as described by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. The age of robots is fast approaching, along with computers that can win “Jeopardy”, that can pattern match with astonishing accuracy and learn from their mistakes. And all of this is driven by fast ubiquitous access to software and hardware residing in The Cloud. And by residing in The Cloud this software and hardware can, on demand, be scaled up to address the most demanding of requirements. This is a world where everyone can have access to the biggest and best available technologies. And the more people who have access to the biggest and best the more innovation will occur. Crowdsourcing the future…. is the future.

So what has this all got to do with the property industry? In a nutshell, everything. A wholesale move to The Cloud, powerfully pushed along by the new paradigm being followed by Microsoft will mean businesses will operate differently and require different things of their offices. With all business applications and information being available anywhere the tyranny of the fixed PC on a fixed desk with a hardwired landline will be over. People will work where they like. Not necessarily outside the office but certainly in a different configuration of space. Office requirements are changing fast. The Cloud just forces the pace.

Retail property will perhaps change the most over the next five years. As of today many in retail think they have seen off the challenge of online through upping their game in offering click and collect and other enhanced shopping experiences. They are wrong. As online tech develops, new services such as SnapFashion, which uses pattern recognition to curate personalised wardrobes for users and is the power behind westfieldeditme.com will make the online shopping experience more and more enticing. Only the best, most creative and technologically savvy retailers will be able to keep up.

How people use space will be dramatically affected as The Cloud gains momentum. Who will keep pace and offer the right product in the right place at the right price? I don’t know. I just know someone will, and many won’t.

Any guesses?

Antony

Real Estate: From a People to a Tech Business

March 2014

It all feels the same doesn’t it? Just like the good old days. Deals a plenty, MIPIM packed, champagne flowing and networking like crazy.

It’s not the same though. The pre-Lehman days might look like they are returning, but they’re not. This time it really is different.

A series of tech megatrends is set to have an enormous impact on society, and in turn the real estate industry.

The days of property being primarily a people business are coming to an end.

First off, smartphones and tablets have ripped computing off the desktop and made it a mobile experience. That alone will transform the workspace as the need for a fixed desk becomes redundant. Without that anchor traditional space planning dies. Perhaps even the ‘office’?

The rollout of 4g and increasingly ubiquitous WiFi means that what is now possible when out and about is transformed. When you can get 28mb downloads on the London Underground you realise anything is possible. It will soon be that where you happen to be will have no impact on the services you can use. Don’t bank on the theory that regardless of connectivity, people like to be on top of each other. That only applies up until connectivity gets fast enough to replicate the experience. Wait and see.

The Internet of Things, where everything becomes a remotely monitored node on the network is set to have an economic impact of $2.7 – 6.2 trillion over the next 12 years, according to McKinsey. And much of that involves tech enabling the built environment to operate more efficiently. Property and facilities management will be transformed. And will probably involve a lot less people, albeit much more highly skilled.

Couple the above trends with the increasing use of ‘The Cloud’ to store data and software applications and you have the ingredients of a massive shift in the way people will use real estate. Simply put, no one is anymore tied to a single location to do their work. Everyone can have, on demand, the very best, most up to date software, and access to all their data, wherever they are. In this environment what real estate is ‘fit for purpose’? This year, or in 5 or 10 years time. Does one go for maximum flexibility? Or planned obsolescence?

And if all this potential change to how we use real estate wasn’t enough, what about how technical advances are going to impact on the work we actually do?

According to Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, a broad range of jobs that once seemed beyond the reach of automation are in danger of being wiped out by technological advances. It used to be that computers were only really good for automating work of a 2+2 = 4 type. Repetitive, structured processes. But recently they have moved well beyond this and now have exceptional capabilities in analysing unstructured information, pattern recognition, natural language processing and machine learning.

It’s said that accounting and legal services may be particularly vulnerable in this new world of computing. The managerial desire to replace labour with capital being what it is, one can only guess at how much space these businesses will need in the future.

To cap it all, more and more data is becoming common knowledge. Governments are slowly realising the value in making the data they control publicly available. Big Data is flavour of the month. Surely it is not long until all property data has that Glasnost moment, and becomes open and transparent.

And then the data will be consumed by that self same increasingly sophisticated software and analysed to death. Automatically. Wither research departments?

Maybe this is why Google have just invested $50,000,000 in auction.com; perhaps they believe online automation is the future of broking?

As tech superstar Marc Andreessen has said ‘Software is eating the world‘. And that will include how the real estate industry works as well as how real estate is consumed.

And when that happens, property will shift from being a people business to a tech one.

Discuss:)

Antony

PS: You’ve probably heard that a computer can beat any chess Grand Master, but did you know, in what is termed freestyle chess, a Grand Master paired with a computer can beat any computer on it’s own. So, for now at least, we’re still masters of the universe!

Two messages to Planet Property from Planet Tech

February 2014

$19,000,000,000

Nineteen Billion Dollars! Even if you say it fast it still is a big big number.

50. Now that is a small number. But what is the connection between the two?

Well, 50 is the number of employees that the company behind the smartphone app WhatsApp needed to build a business that they have just sold to Facebook for $19,000,000,000.

What therefore is equally small is the amount of office space they require. And whilst they are perhaps an extreme example the message that should be screaming out to the property world is that Planet Tech does not need all that much office space. Or people.

So even when the economy really recovers, office demand, from this sector at least, is going to have different characteristics from ‘the old economy’. Even the big names aren’t big in terms of their space or people requirements. Take Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon out of the equation and the typical tech company is, relatively speaking, a tiddler.

Couple this basic characteristic with the rise of robots and software that comes close to mimicking human capabilities, and one does have to consider the effect on property demand with a degree of trepidation. The recently published ‘The Second Machine Age’ by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee is a worthwhile read in this context.

The second message is all about messaging itself, and the difference between old (or ‘traditional’ if you must) and new ways of communicating.

A few days ago on Twitter a billboard surrounding a new development was causing much hilarity through its use of marketing bullshit. On one panel we had ‘Vision’, ‘Destination’, ‘Landmark’, ‘Vibrant’ and (for the kids?) ‘Community Hub’. For those used to the much more ‘real’ world of social media (such as WhatsApp’s 450,000,000 users) the inherent insincerity of this old school approach piqued amusement rather than interest.

The commercial property world has to date barely engaged with social media and when it has done so the approach tends to be a bit stilted, a bit corporate. As with old school marketing the approach is very ‘Talk at’, very broadcast. Social though is ‘Talk with’; the principal is to engage with one’s audience, often on a one to one basis and in language that is real. If you can’t imagine yourself saying the words, then try again.

Remember: your audience has in their pocket a computer of astonishing power. Your message should be aimed at that device. And the message should be human, useful and enticing.

Antony