How to Stay on Top of Innovation - Tech Insiders News, May 2023

Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #36!

A curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Stay on top: The Map Is Not The Territory

This is the first part of a series of articles on staying on top of the innovation news.

Isn’t it overwhelming? It seems that every day, new progress in Artificial Intelligence is emerging. Is the Metaverse dead? Will the new Apple headset disrupt the industry as the iPhone did?

How can you stay on top of the innovation while not spending all your day browsing LinkedIn or Twitter?

What should you care for and make the correct decisions for your business?

There is a very helpful concept named «The Map Is Not The Territory». What it basically means is there are many ways to look at reality, but not of these is complete and detailed enough to be a complete representation of reality. Do you use Google Maps? The map view is helpful for directions, and the satellite view is convenient for exploring, but none of these is a full, complete, and accurate representation of the Earth.

My point is: don’t confuse the maps (the news, the tweets, the buzz) with the reality (actual innovation).

It’s not because thousands of services using Artificial Intelligence have appeared in the past month that you should drop everything and create your own.

It’s not because Virtual Reality is mature in 2023 that you should absolutely use it for your next project without investigating if it’s the correct medium.

So what should you do? Here are a few tips:

• Embrace the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). You’re already super busy; you can’t read all the news. It’s OK! Don’t worry. The trend is important, not the details.
• Adopt a Scout Mindset (Concept and book by Julia Galef). By using curiosity, unbiased truth-seeking, and a bird’s eye view, you can make the correct decisions in opposition to a Soldier Mindset that uses motivated reasoning to defend your pre-existing beliefs.
• Look at your sources: are you getting your news from a narrow range of views? Expand them by following thought leaders with different opinions.
• Assess your biases. Are you a victim of confirmation bias? That can happen if you let the Twitter algorithm work for you.

These are the concepts used in this newsletter and the Podcast; and, more generally, by our team at Gimbal Cube when we work with you.

If that resonates and you want to dig deeper, get in touch with me!

This Week's News:

1. Imagine: you see a post by your favorite influencer on Instagram. She’s visiting Portugal, and she has really nice shoes.
   You click on a link to see the shoes; you can try them in Augmented Reality, send the pictures to your friends for feedback, and directly purchase.
   There is also a link to the restaurant she’s in; you can experience a 360° video of the terrasse where the chef explains the menu. It looks delicious; you bookmark it along with a 5% coupon.
   This is what young customers want, and brands should embrace this new «Immersive Social Commerce», according to a study by Magna Media Trials.
   In a traditional customer journey, if you see a product you like somewhere, you must search for it online, open the brand website, and finally purchase. Social Commerce starts instead from a recommendation or a post from a friend, an ad, or an influencer with a direct link to the product.
   It not only shortens the journey, but it also makes it more efficient for the brand as users are more likely to purchase.
   And by adding Augmented Reality on top of it, brands will bring the excitement of in-store shopping to e-commerce, especially if there is a social sharing component to it.
   Note: Snapchat sponsors this research, so they have skin in the game. Also, most of it is based on opinions, not real data. Also, it seems that USA, UK, and Germany are mostly a bit above average, while Saudi Arabia is pulling the trend up. I wonder why?
   Still, I agree with the conclusions above!
   Source Magna Media Trials
2. Other e-commerce notable updates:
   You can now search for an Ikea product name in Google, and it will be directly available for you to try in Augmented Reality. This is great, and it’s a trend that brands should follow more; I wonder if it’s the best user journey, though, as you have to type exactly the product name, and Ikea product names can be… challenging. The most challenging part of using Augmented Reality for e-commerce is fitting: it’s very difficult technically, especially for clothes. This is what Zalando is trying to solve by creating a Virtual Fitting room for jeans.
   Will this solve the huge number of returns?
   Source: Zalando
3. With AI, it’s quite easy now to generate a song with the voice of any artist, and many «fakes» are appearing. There’s one way to react: try to stop it and add regulations. There’s another way, and Canadian artist Grimes embraced it by saying she’ll split 50/50 the royalties with any successful AI-generated song that uses her voice.
   I couldn’t verify it, but I read that she is also considering building a blockchain-based system to automate the royalties with smart-contract. If it’s true, it’s very smart of her!

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week:

1. If Seen Then That: we expand on an article I mentioned last week of an experiment by oio.land to showcase the interactions with the real world using Augmented Reality Glasses. We all found it very interesting and hope that the convergence of AR and the Internet Of Objects will create amazing opportunities.
2. Snapchat AR Retail: as I explained last week, Snapchat is entering the retail market. We wonder if the business model is software-only or includes hardware, and hope that to be really effective, it should be connected to the store’s inventory…
3. We then discuss Metavisi, a company that seems to have a wide range of hardware available, but none of us has seen tests - is it a «fake it until you make it» company, or is there a huge potential?

Tune in at 10 am UTC on Wednesdays on Twitch, and listen to the replays on Youtube!