Marissa and I came across a what seemed to be a really nifty product on the web yesterday: SNIF tags. These tags, developed by a startup founded by a number of MIT Media Lab grads, both monitor your dog's activity level and upload the data to the web (acting essentially like a networked canine pedometer) and, more interestingly, will detect when your dog has met another dog wearing a SNIF tag and connect them as "friends" on the company's web site, in theory allowing your dog to have is own social network - a doggie Facebook, if you will.
It seems great (Marissa did point out that in our dog Mochi's case, it might be embarassing to have an online record of the fact he probably spends 20 hrs a day immobile and asleep.) But there are some pretty major issues, and while I don't think they're the fault of the designers, I do think they're endemic to this kind of product and need a better solution.
It seems great (Marissa did point out that in our dog Mochi's case, it might be embarassing to have an online record of the fact he probably spends 20 hrs a day immobile and asleep.) But there are some pretty major issues, and while I don't think they're the fault of the designers, I do think they're endemic to this kind of product and need a better solution.
First of all, there's the price. We were really excited about the concept of this product, but before we clicked over to the purchase page, I asked Marissa to guess how much it would cost. She went with $60... I went with $100, figuring this device was probably parallel in internal complexity to say, a bluetooth headset. The actual price? $150.
Ouch. That's more than I paid up front for my Blackberry, which is a device I use extensively every day, and which I depend on for both my professional and personal communications needs.
That's a lot for something that may be destroyed by Mochi if he is having a bad day. And it's even worse when you realize that the "social networking" half of this product (which the site says was the original focus of the design) is essentially useless until they've sold a few hundred thousand units, at least. Remember the whole "Zune to Zune" wireless transfer feature? Remember how useless it was because they never sold enough Zunes that you were likely to know someone who had one? This is the exact same problem. To put it another way, it's like Facebook charging $150 for membership back when nobody used it and none of your friends were on there. (Or for the older crowd, like being the first guy to buy a fax machine.)
SNIF tries to get users past that hurdle by providing additional functionality that's not dependent on interaction with other purchasers - specifically, the networked pedometer function, which lets you see online how active your dog is, and if the walker or daycare is exercising them adequately. It's a great idea - and I might even be interested, for say $20 or $30 dollars. But not $150... even for a rabid early-adopter and a guy who loves quantitative data, that's a lot of money to verify how lazy the dog is.
(One of my guesses is that this product is an evolution of an earlier concept at the Media Lab, which was conference badges that were networked and lit up when you went near someone else with similar or compatible interests. That concept at least had the benefit of a more likely ROI on the investment if you were a salesperson or other aggressive networker who uses conferences as way to make commercially valuable connections.)
I'm not sure what the solution is. Clearly, if they can get the volume of production up, the unit price of these tags should come down. But there needs to be a more compelling value proposition for end users.
One idea that did come to mind is the "Tivo" pricing model, where you drive down the initial purchase price hurdle by requiring a monthly data subscription fee (but also offering a premium option where a user can get "lifetime" service for a larger lump sum.) That would at least reduce the risk users have to take when making the initial purchase.
I guess, like Facebook, the company could focus on saturating certain niche markets to achieve the kind of critical mass and network density you need to make these kind of products worthwhile. (E.g., West Village pugs, or something.) But it's not going to be easy - anything over $50-$60 seems to take this product out of the "entertainment value" category and into the "utility value" realm, and right now, there just isn't a lot of utility to it.
Ouch. That's more than I paid up front for my Blackberry, which is a device I use extensively every day, and which I depend on for both my professional and personal communications needs.
That's a lot for something that may be destroyed by Mochi if he is having a bad day. And it's even worse when you realize that the "social networking" half of this product (which the site says was the original focus of the design) is essentially useless until they've sold a few hundred thousand units, at least. Remember the whole "Zune to Zune" wireless transfer feature? Remember how useless it was because they never sold enough Zunes that you were likely to know someone who had one? This is the exact same problem. To put it another way, it's like Facebook charging $150 for membership back when nobody used it and none of your friends were on there. (Or for the older crowd, like being the first guy to buy a fax machine.)
SNIF tries to get users past that hurdle by providing additional functionality that's not dependent on interaction with other purchasers - specifically, the networked pedometer function, which lets you see online how active your dog is, and if the walker or daycare is exercising them adequately. It's a great idea - and I might even be interested, for say $20 or $30 dollars. But not $150... even for a rabid early-adopter and a guy who loves quantitative data, that's a lot of money to verify how lazy the dog is.
(One of my guesses is that this product is an evolution of an earlier concept at the Media Lab, which was conference badges that were networked and lit up when you went near someone else with similar or compatible interests. That concept at least had the benefit of a more likely ROI on the investment if you were a salesperson or other aggressive networker who uses conferences as way to make commercially valuable connections.)
I'm not sure what the solution is. Clearly, if they can get the volume of production up, the unit price of these tags should come down. But there needs to be a more compelling value proposition for end users.
One idea that did come to mind is the "Tivo" pricing model, where you drive down the initial purchase price hurdle by requiring a monthly data subscription fee (but also offering a premium option where a user can get "lifetime" service for a larger lump sum.) That would at least reduce the risk users have to take when making the initial purchase.
I guess, like Facebook, the company could focus on saturating certain niche markets to achieve the kind of critical mass and network density you need to make these kind of products worthwhile. (E.g., West Village pugs, or something.) But it's not going to be easy - anything over $50-$60 seems to take this product out of the "entertainment value" category and into the "utility value" realm, and right now, there just isn't a lot of utility to it.
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