The coming age of digital brands: RIAs + widgets
If your job is to build brands, now is the time to learn more about powerful digital platforms taking shape in 
the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and widgets. These two software advances are about to transform the way you build brand relationships, and the way you deliver brand experience.
In the coming years, brands that master these new platforms will be able to outpace and outflank their competitors.
RIA’s and widgets will break down barriers between you and your customers. Through them, your brands will become less mediated, maybe even “immediate”—which is exactly where brands want to be. They’ll become closer to the user. They’ll enable new realms of customer interaction that are fine-grained, flexible, personalized, data-enabled and visually engaging—on digital devices from computers to cell phones.
Click through this OpenLaszlo dashboard demo to see what’s in the works. This is a “web page” that incorporates deep interactions. It’s the forerunner of the “RIA Web” of tomorrow—where richer forms of brand interaction can take root.
RIAs put more brand in the hands of users
With RIAs, the goal is to do in a lightweight browser what is now done with traditional desktop applications. A web page or widget can behave like a mini-application. Ajax-enabled Google Maps and mashups are one example of RIAs, but current apps are just scratching the surface. For brand builders, the ultimate goal is a fluid, seamless user experience where the (brand) application empowers user intent.
The RIA brand benefit
The RIA brand benefit is that users will have more powerful and more flexible tools to get things done. The idea (and ideal) is that you just open your browser and call on lightweight, purpose-built apps (or widgets) available online. A company’s brand presence can ride along with these apps, or incarnate the apps themselves, adding “deep-tissue” brand value to a variety of activities.
Conceptual Example: Think of a “personal trainer” fitness widget from a Nike or an Adidas that could include a personal diet regimen, your exercise goals and stats, your training charts and graphs, your weight targets, tips, and everything else you need to stay fit, updated daily. Accessible on your laptop or on your web-enabled cell phone, this app might greet you in the morning and team with you during the day, depending on the interaction you want. The first desktop steps toward such an application are now being offered.
A value stream that only you can deliver
As a brand builder, you should view RIAs and widgets as elements of a unique value stream that only you can deliver. Plan to deploy them as teams of smaller, value-rich brand applications available on the fly, used by customers to accomplish vital tasks. A brand might orchestrate a dozen or so RIAs or widgets as part of a strategic deliverable. In this manner, a brand could form whole new sets of creative connections with customers in areas of new business development, or in strategic areas of interest. The chosen deployment would depend on the type and style of brand presence a company desires, and where the brand intends to lead customers.
Brand applications on mobile devices
Because of form factor and wireless connection limitations, these new advances will be harder to achieve on mobile devices. But, they will happen. Currently, Opera has a leading mobile browser for RIA functionality.
See our recent post on mobile brands here.
Links
Here are some links to get you started:
- RIA background from Wikipedia
- The del.icio.us RIA tag (to keep you current)
- Recent RIA Roundup
- Om Malik on the widget potential
- Our previous posts on widgets: here, here and here.
Will all brands run through Adobe?
Adobe (now with Macromedia inside) is positioned to be a powerful player in the RIA field. It’s quite possible that in the future all brands will run through Adobe. In fact, Adobe’s new cross-platform Apollo runtime (due in 2007) is a potential game changer in digital brand experience.
December 27th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Nice post, but I don’t see Adobe in such a powerful position. Microsoft with Windows Presentation Foundation, especially WPF/e will have much more marketing power.
OpenLaszlo will in the long run play a bigger role than Adobe. They are not only delivering proprietary runtimes (Flash or ActiveX), but offer a platform which can be extended to any technically possible runtime target like WPF/e, SVG, etc.
OpenLaszlo 4.0 (due in the first quarter of 2007) will already support DHTML/AJAX and Flash runtimes from the same code base. In cooperation with SUN there will be Java Micro Edition support. That means all Java enabled devices (PDAs, mobile phones, TV set-top-boxes) could be running OpenLaszlo programs. And technically it’s a small step from Java Micro Edition to Java Standard Edition.
December 28th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Raju,
Thanks for the informed comment. You know a lot more about the workings of RIA platforms than I do. Personally I hope OpenLazlo does well. A lot of brand value is created at the customer and community level, where an open software platform is a natural fit. Based on the demo’s I’ve seen, I have no doubt that OpenLazlo can do the job with the resources it has now, and under development.
In the long run, I think which platform becomes the “standard” among brand builders may have more to do with available tools and developer support than the software itself. In this regard, Adobe has its legions of Flash developers, new stuff in video and voice, and its depth in the web design community thanks to Photoshop, et. al.
If OpenLazlo built a lead in brand-specific applications, then it could certainly play a key role in this particular market. It’s open territory at this point.
January 5th, 2007 at 8:47 am
[...] Here I am again writing about the potential of widgets to become new digital platforms for delivering brand value. To date, the progress of widgets toward brand-building levels has been slower than I expected (eternal optimist that I am). Truth is, brands significantly raise the bar for widget performance. A survey of the widget-scape still finds too many world clocks, weather reports, and single news feeds to enable this new brand form factor to begin to spread its wings. [...]
February 28th, 2007 at 7:38 am
[...] See our previous post on RIA’s here. And this example. [...]