In the just ended 2016 new network business annual ceremony, the Internet mobile phone brand glory won the “2016 new network business annual Brand Award”. But when everyone thought glory president Zhao Ming would give his opinion on brand marketing or new retail, zhao Ming, a technical background, gave a speech entitled “Artificial intelligence technology breakthrough of mobile phone”.
All along, honor brand marketing has a core line, that is, technology to empower products, products for the brand voice. This is also the reason why Honor is defined as a technology enterprise by the industry. The reason why the honor Magic released recently is called “future mobile phone” is not unrelated to the cutting-edge technology elements it contains. At the same time, there are also many product-oriented companies in the mobile phone market, the typical representatives of which are Apple and Xiaomi, which have achieved a decisive position in the market.
Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
And in the arrival of artificial intelligence today, how do technology companies and product companies grasp this trend, and what does it portend for the future?
What’s the difference between technology-driven and product-driven?
In the mobile phone industry, Honor’s Huawei Group can be said to be the best representative of technology-driven, while Apple is truly a product-driven enterprise. A comparison of the two styles of AI development reveals the differences.
Start with Huawei. The positioning of mobile products has changed several times in the development process, from the original communication device to entertainment device to the next generation of computing center. But smartphones play two additional roles in Huawei’s strategy. In the trend of Internet of all things, mobile terminals play the role of the entrance to connect all things. The HiLink smart home system released by Huawei can remotely control all networked smart homes through mobile phones to achieve interconnection. In the era of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, mobile phones are still the core carrier of ARTIFICIAL intelligence in Huawei’s eyes, which is also the consensus of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. For the mobile phone this new role, Zhao Ming in the day’s speech carried on the detailed elaboration.
According to Zhao Ming, Honor will rely on Huawei’s RESEARCH and development system, continue to build the four basic capabilities of “end”, “connection”, “cloud” and “core”, realize the important layout of the blueprint of smart phone, and update people’s understanding of Internet phone in a new form of Internet phone.
The end, which can be likened to the body, uses a sea of sensors and end-to-end artificial intelligence to replicate a human’s ability to perceive the real world.
Connection can be described as language. By establishing a communication language system for smart devices, a unified communication language can be achieved between smart phones and smart devices, so as to realize the interconnection of everything in a real sense.
The cloud, which can be seen as massive data generated by the brain, sensors and connections, enables cognition and decision-making through big data and machine deep learning in the cloud.
The core, like the heart, will be able to speed up deep learning algorithms, provide computing power and secure protection based on Kirin chip technology, communication technology and advanced technology.
Focus on the product, honor as early as glory 8, Glory V8 and other products have been through voice recognition and other functions of artificial intelligence in the initial attempt, and The glory Magic perception on the screen on and off, FaceCode recognition, intelligent partner and other new functions combined with artificial intelligence technology, It switches the human-computer interaction of mobile phones from touch and voice control era to scene recognition era, and also marks the first step of Huawei and Honor’s attempt to combine ARTIFICIAL intelligence with mobile phones. Of course, Huawei and Honor still have a long way to go in the layout of smart phones, such as custom language understanding, computer vision, deep learning, decision system, recommendation system and other technological precipitation and breakthroughs.
Back to Apple. The release of the first generation of iPhone triggered the first wave of human-computer interaction, and the mobile phone industry stepped into the touch era from the key era. The launch of the iPhone 4S and the introduction of Siri ushered in a new era of voice interaction. But with Jobs gone, iPhone sales have continued to soar and Apple has become a product-driven company.
On the one hand, Apple has been making functional improvements for the last five years. Since iPhone 4S, Apple has been continuously “micro-innovation” of product functions in mobile phone products. Although Touch ID and 3D Touch have optimized the human-computer interaction mode of mobile phone to a certain extent, fingerprint identification has been applied in mobile phone as early as 2003. MOTOROLA launched its first fingerprint-recognition smartphone, the ME860, in 2011. In short, Apple is acting more as a practitioner of mature technologies than a pioneer of new ones.
On the other hand, product-driven Apple may miss out on being a leader in the ERA of AI. Not long ago, Apple released its first AI report, and it was hard to surprise beyond the surprise. Technically, Apple’s once-tight-lipped A.I. research is still focused on image recognition and hasn’t moved beyond technology-driven companies like Google. As for product thinking, Apple is still trying to use AI to improve cameras and other applications, while competitors like Huawei and Honor are already planning bigger plans.
It is not hard to find that such a phenomenon has been manifested in the early era of artificial intelligence. Technology-driven companies have a more accurate grasp of the trend of technological evolution, while product-driven companies are still trying to meet the perceived needs of users. With the development of AI, technology-driven and product-driven enterprises will develop in different directions and reap different outcomes.
Behind the different choices, what kind of competitive landscape has been triggered?
To be sure, there are industry leaders in their respective fields, whether technology-driven or product-driven, and it’s hard to judge who’s right from a business perspective. And when the two appear in the same market, behind the different choices, has chosen a different form of competition for themselves.
Relying on Huawei’s r&d platform, Honor Mobile has become a testing ground for Huawei’s most advanced and cutting-edge technologies. Because of this, Honor, which was born as an Internet mobile phone, is becoming more and more like a technology-driven brand. Since the birth of the brand in 2013, Honor has successfully entered the forefront of domestic mobile phones, with kirin chip, dual camera, Magic Live and other technical advantages to establish a strong competitive threshold. In contrast, brands that came along with Glory and followed a product-driven model have either deteriorated, disappeared or failed to get out of the “small and beautiful” trap. Why?
I’m afraid this has to be deeply dug to explain the way of operation. In general, the product-driven model is in which the product manager leads the product development process, but the product manager is suitable for functional improvement rather than new technology incubation. The idea is often to form a big bonus point with a small bonus point in each step, and grasp the pain point needs of users in a certain point or several improvements, so as to further improve user experience.
Thus, there are two outcomes. One is represented by Apple, which has insight into user needs and carries out minimally invasive innovation to improve user experience. At the same time, it relies on fine operation and brand marketing to gain a foothold in the high-end market. The other is passive and lacks user perception and market sensitivity. It has to closely watch its competitors like a Wolf and copy new products and product models quickly. Homogeneous competition seems to be the inevitable fate to get rid of.
Technology-driven costs also exist: exorbitant costs. Such companies tend to have an engineering culture, but technological breakthroughs are difficult to translate into commercial profits in a short time and require sustained investment in research and development. That’s probably why Huawei spent nearly $60 billion on R&D last year. On the plus side, staying ahead of competitors in technology and thinking gives the company the opportunity to try and error on products and businesses, and to have an accurate forecast of the business environment.
Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.
Perhaps in the conventional competition, the gap between technology-driven and product-driven is not obvious, and when the new technological era is approaching, technology-driven enterprises have already started to break out in technology, while product-driven players are still waiting and looking for the delayed arrival of user needs. Now that artificial intelligence is in the ascendant, similar tensions can already be detected in the mobile phone market.
Overall, Huawei and Glory, which see AI as the next era of smartphones, are once again ahead of their rivals. This is far more valuable than brand marketing success, and of course it is in line with honor’s style of polishing products and brands.