The $105 Billion Enterprise Market for Pokémon Go
What’s happening this week at the intersection of management and technology.
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Tech Savvy
© iStock/adamkaz
Putting Pokémon Go to work: Suddenly, Pokémon Go, the app based on the 20-year-old video game, is everywhere. People with smartphones are more like zombies than ever. Marketers are formulating their Pokémon Go strategies. Thanks, augmented reality!
The consumer market is not the only place AR is taking off, according to Bhavesh Kumar of VMWare AirWatch. “There’s increasingly reason to believe that AR could take off for businesses long before it goes mainstream with consumers,” he declared in a blog post that appeared one day before Pokémon Go, well, went mainstream with consumers.
But that doesn’t mean Kumar is wrong. He’s right in saying that the AR device ecosystem is more developed for the enterprise market than for the consumer market, and that the industry standards needed to put AR to work are already emerging.
Moreover, Kumar is backed up by a new study from Index AR Solutions, a developer of customized AR business solutions for the corporate market that is collaborating with Newport News Shipbuilding. Index AR forecasts that the enterprise market for AR will hit $105 billion within 15 years, including $49 billion in hardware, $11 billion in software, and $45 billion in services. Assuming, of course, that we can tear ourselves away from Pokémon Go.
Using digital exhaust to drive sales: Digital exhaust — the data tracks we leave behind whenever we are online — is a rich source of insight. Google and Facebook have built huge (and perhaps unsustainable?) businesses on it. And you know the CIA’s recently established Directorate of Digital Innovation is poring over it. So maybe it’s high time your sales department got into the act.
“Now a new breed of software applications is reshaping sales force management,” explains Bain & Company partner Mark Kovac in an article for HBR.org. “Their common characteristic: Using digital data exhaust, which is the data generated from the regular activities of a sales force or their customers, to change the behavior of frontline sales representatives in ways that dramatically improve sales productivity and effectiveness.”
Kovac offers three companies that are fielding solutions fueled by digital exhaust. VoloMetrix collects and analyzes calendar and email metadata to determine how salespeople spend their time, and to give their managers the opportunity to redirect their activities — to high-value customers, for instance.