It has been interesting to me -- almost another study, in fact -- seeing people's reactions to what we do and the patent. I've never hidden what we do or how we do it, nor have I been shouting it from the rooftops. During NextStage's seven year (at this point) run I've been criticized for not revealing NextStage's client list, for not publicly sharing how we do what we do and for not giving our technology freely to others (among other things. Did you know I'm obnoxious, arrogant and disliked?)

Let me explain NextStage's Evolution Technology as I did in Toronto because several people have talked with me about it since then. Two comments that come to mind are "You really dropped a bombshell on us" and "That'll put a lot of us out of business." Neither was my intention. I do understand that Evolution Technology's ability to understand human psychology without asking questions, without polling visitors, without having people fill out forms, without using other companies' databases, etc., is mind-stretching to many people.

I'll start with some quotes from NextStage's IP attorney, "...a programmable device...", "...Evolution Technology determines how a person is thinking." and "...while NextStage is currently focused on digital media and web site activity, this disruptive technology also lends itself to a host of other areas...".

What's a "programmable device"? Most people are unaware of how many devices in their everyday world are programmable. For example, a stereo (CD changer, radio, etc.), office, home and cellular phones, voicemail systems, computers, printers, home and business HVAC systems, lighting, fax machines, exercise equipment, watches, video and still cameras, websites, TVs, DVRs, VCRs, MPG players, microwaves, stoves, ovens, refrigerators, sleep number beds, cars planes, self-service checkouts, mall kiosks and store help stations, ... I think you'd be hard pressed to find something not programmable these days. The levels to which these devices can be programmed varies and still they are all programmable. One that I didn't mention and that I think is important is weaponry. Lots of weapons have programmable features these days.

What about "how a person is thinking"? Right now, as you're reading this, you're thinking. The fact is people can not not think. It may be conscious, it may be non-conscious. It might be day-dreaming. Your thoughts can be focused on a problem or just wondering about dinner. Making plans or remembering past times. Everybody thinks.

The even more interesting thing is that most people aren't aware of everything going on in their heads at any given time. That "going on in their heads" is significant because that's the "how a person is thinking" part of NextStage's patent.

Humans have the ability to know how someone else is thinking and feeling with a high degree of accuracy. All social creatures learn to pick up the cues that others give without knowing they give them and there's nothing "ESPish" involved, it's a simple survival requirement. We know when someone is sad, when they're happy, when they're tired, upset, so on and so forth. We respond with comfort, shared joy, offers of rest, whatever the situation and our abilities dictate.

What Evolution Technology does is give that level of empathy, sympathy, understanding -- ie, suitable response, ie "whatever the situation and our abilities dictate" -- to any programmable device. Any programmable device can now know that a user is sad, happy, tired, upset, ... And that's just the low hanging fruit, so to speak.

Once you understand that men think differently than women then you appreciate that Evolution Technology can determine if someone is male or female. Recognize that people of different ages think differently then you understand that Evolution Technology can determine someone's age.

Just as you can. Without asking questions. That's the major part, I think. The technology doesn't need to ask questions, have people fill out forms, query other databases, add software or appliances to their computer or (in the case of websites) drop cookies. Consider yourself sitting at the food court in a mall and watching people walk past. You can tell their gender and make a good guess of their age without asking them any questions. You can probably tell quite a bit about them if you put your mind to it. Are they happy? Proud? Tired? Worried? Lost in thought? Thinking about what they'll buy? Distracted? Engaged?

You do all this with a vast experiential memory of everyone you've ever interacted with and gauge that memory against what you're seeing when you watch someone walking through the mall (what NextStage calls "interacting with their environment"). Evolution Technology does exactly the same thing and in almost the exact same ways. As I write this, it has an experiential memory of everyone who's ever interacted with it in a lab or on the web since 1991. When someone interacts with an Evolution Technology enabled website, Evolution Technology starts comparing how that person is "interacting with their environment", ie, navigating a web site, and makes some very accurate predictions about whether visitors are engaged, distracted, thinking about buying, comparison shopping, their age, their gender, just about anything they're thinking about while they're on a web site based on its experiential knowledge.

Well, that and enough mathematics to...well, to understand human thought.

There are other things you do with your experiential knowledge that you might not think about. You pick out gifts for people and know if someone will like something or not.

Well, Evolution Technology can do that, too. It can look at marketing material and know whether or not the marketing material will work with a given audience or not. And how to change it so that it will work with a given audience. Or what to do to increase that audience. Or segment it.

One thing marketing does a lot of these days is create imaginary friends and imbue them with lots of traits and attitudes. Marketers don't call these creations "imaginary friends" of course, the term they use is personae. Evolution Technology has the ability to create personae, too, and give them not only traits and attitudes but also rich explanations of why those traits exist, why their attitudes are their attitudes and how to change them, how they make decisions, what makes them remember this thing and not that thing, why and when they'll buy this and not that.

So much for the obvious. Evolution Technology has applications on the internet, yes, and that was never its original intention. I originally designed it as a learning tool. One of its strongest uses is its ability to quickly determine how someone is thinking then modify educational material to best match that individual's learning and memorization styles. This guarantees that what is learned is retained and that the learner will learn in such a way that the information is easily actionable by them.

Another of its early uses was (and remains) the ability to read something and determine the original intent and thinking of the author. Did a student plagiarize or have someone else author their paper? Is a business partner being honest and dealing fairly? Are workers working in the company's best interest? Those were easy and obvious problems to solve.

Now stretch a bit. Some of the following list is totally doable, we simply haven't gotten around to them yet. Others are blue-sky for now.

What about search engines that know what you're really looking for and return truly relevant results?

What about online help systems that know what you're really trying to do and provide exact information on the required steps?

What about online dating services that know what you're really looking for in a partner and provide real matches that meet your real needs.

What about websites that can determine someone's real intention when they get on the site? Being able to recognize predatory behavior and alert authorities that children and others may be in danger, for instance? Or being able to recognize that someone is visiting a NASA or sports event site for a school project as opposed to a terrorist act?

What about cars that know you shouldn't be driving and call you a cab instead? Or that the person behind the wheel hasn't been given authority to drive and simply don't start or safely shut down?

How about aircraft that know the pilot's flying under duress or no longer at the controls and automatically request fighter escorts, or alert control towers that immediate intervention is needed?

How about weapons that know the owner is no longer holding them, or that only operate defensively, never offensively?

Or weapons that can report whether an act was self-defense or not. Or lie detectors that can really tell the truth.

Take a few moments and think about everything around you being able to respond to you with compassion and understanding, not just the dumb mind of a machine. Makes you think, doesn't it?

I hope so.

The chart at the right is an example of our Veritas tool (simple information rules apply, folks. Green is go or in this case, people telling the truth. Red is for people who are intentionally or deliberately...umm...inventing information whole cloth. The yellow is the interesting stuff. That's the people who are, oh, shall we say "imagining" information. They're embellishing or exaggerating either a little or a lot. These charts, by the way, were generated 10 Apr 08 at 3:30pmET and are from data being gathered by about 30 sites in our system for a seven day period (3-10 April 08)). First, note that I used "fabricating" in the chart. Even more politely I might call it "imagineering". People fabricate information for more reasons than it's worth going into here. It's just simplest to recognize that for an amazingly large number of social reasons people will invent information rather than relay known information. Also note that I'm not making any value statements here.

The reader's implied question, "Are people truthful online and how can you increase their truthfulness?" is a good one to ask. The answer deals with things like "Mechanism Design Theory" and "Nash Equilibriums", mathematical tools we use in our Veritas reports (above). It's making me wonder, though, what we have in our existing data that we haven't looked at yet. Hmm...let's take a peek.

For example, we routinely provide a gender breakdown to our clients such as that shown at the right (simple information rules apply, folks. Blue is for boys, pink is for girls).

Then I got to wondering which gender fabricates more. The reason this reframe of the query came to mind is due to some other research I'm doing on how sexual selection among males and females has changed in the internet age.

As a ratio of fabricators to truthtellers, females, it seems, tend to be the more...umm...inventive in the information their providing online (and this has more to do with the sites selected for these examples, I think).

But, as mentioned above, there are many reasons people fabricate information and very few of the reasons are due to a desire to deceive maliciously. The majority of reasons deal with insuring the social fabric remains whole. People, as a whole, fabricate information to prevent trauma rather than cause pain. Colloquially these are the "little white lies" we tell, the "You look mahvalous" and "No, that doesn't make you look fat" and "Oh, I love your new hairstyle" when what we want to say is "What, there are no mirrors in your house?"

So I wondered how many of the people online were deliberately, intentionally fabricating information with a desire to deceive, to (for lack of a better word) lie. Those numbers are remarkably low and almost identical as percentages of gender populations; 1.6% for males (left stacks in the image), 1.7% for females (right stacks in the image).

Okay, enough fun with graphics. What can be done with the knowledge that people are fabricating information on line?

There are several solutions, really. The one we use and offer to clients is to simply not ask questions or, more accurately, to ask questions that people don't recognize as questions.

Think of it this way (and this is something I've demonstrated with clients and in presentations repeatedly), any question I ask is going to put you on the defensive. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, and you'll have no choice. There are parts of your neural wiring and psychological make-up that tell your autonomic and sympathetic nervous systems to go on the defensive and to protect your "being". The amount of training required to stop these reflexes -- because that's what they are, reflexes that kept us alive during our descent from the trees and walks across the pampas. That's why they're hard-wired into us. They kept our ancestors alive long enough to create us. You don't throw that kind of evolutionary advantage away in what, three to six generations of living in a "modern" world? -- is more than most people can endure.

This wiring is why many NextStage clients prefer using our technology to gather visitor information than outright ask questions online. Eric Drouart, former VP of International Operations for Bristol-Myers Squibb and now retired, said, "Marketing research methodologies that rely on questionnaires and standard surveys are inherently loaded with biases and errors related to the sampling frame, the survey instruments, the interviewers and the fact that the respondents know that they are being evaluated. NextStage is truly a non-biasing research tool with a lot of validity and reliability because it is based on non-conscious responses to information. This methodology offers a lot of advantages over traditional methods to evaluate the appeal and the benefits of a web site."

What falls from this is getting answers without asking questions. Every time you present a visitor with navigation options you've essentially asked "What will you do now? Where will you go from here? What is more appealing to you?" The problem is that most designers and marketers, etc., don't realize they're asking these questions hence they don't know how to interpret the responses visitors are non-consciously giving them.

Let's call these "answers without asking questions" soft answers. What about "hard" answers, things like email addresses and such?

I've explained methods to get hard data answers from visitors in Reading Virtual Minds Volume 2 (not in print yet). The easiest method is to provide visitors with something that they recognize has equal or greater value than the hard data you're requesting from them. Think of it as a value exchange. How much do I have to pay you for you to give me your email address?

Maybe you'll give me your "junk" email address (your @google, @hotmail, @yahoo, etc., email) for a dollar? What about your business email address? Maybe $10-15? What about your personal email address, the one you don't publicize anywhere and that you only give out to friends? Maybe $100-200? And then you'll go create a new one and email all your friends that you're switching your account?

This plays into another topic that comes up often in trainings and presentations; the concept and recognition of value vs worth, something we call "None-One-A lot-All". People will place different values on the same thing based on their culture, language, personal history, so on and so forth. The key is to learn these things in advance so that you'll guess the "price" of their hard data accurately more often than not and offer them good value for the hard information they're giving you.

NextStage pioneered a hard data acquisition method that has been taken up by several other organizations, the most well known being the British music group Radiohead. The basic method is "We're offering this for free, you decide what it's worth and we'll give it to you." NextStage makes several papers available as direct pdf downloads, no questions asked, no forms to fill out. At the bottom of each pdf is "If you enjoyed, please contact or download". Our material is designed such that people require three touches before purchasing from us (and yes, there's a reason for three touches. Let me know if you're interested and I'll put the explanation in another newsletter) and we're currently getting a 75% conversion rate. I'm told we're going to experiment with another method and I'll let you know how that goes.

So how do you deal with people fabricating information? Easy. Remove their reason to fabricate information and they won't. Give me a call if you need some help with this. I find this kind of stuff fascinating. You probably noticed.

In all cases, though, "engagement" means some kind of action is taking place. That's my "psychomotor activity" and Eric's "visitor interaction".

I've been working with Eric on two things; one is TheFutureOf blog (and I doubt Eric anticipated how much I'd research things before I posted them). The other is The Engagement Project, a study of what "engagement" means and how to measure it in its various forms.

Eric had offered a calculation that posed some limitations on both the definition and its ability to traverse different interfaces. I analyzed Eric's calculation as part of a response to one of his TheFutureOf comments and realized there might be challenges to it down the road, so I offered to rewrite Eric's calculation in a more robust form.

The desire was to create a mathematical form that would be useful regardless of interface, would allow all interpretations of "engagement" to co-exist within a given framework and could be valued within the capabilities of the interface. These were summed up (for website purposes) in:

1. What do you mean when you use the words "engagement", "attention", and "trust" online?
2. Can you repeatedly measure what you mean by them so that there's a reasonable surety that what you're measuring is what you mean by the terms you've used?
3. Can you make these measurements through a commonly used web-enabled device?

The result (and what we'll be sharing at Emetrics San Francisco) is a mathematical model for "engagement" that's robust enough to incorporate any definition that fits the three conditions listed above and is adaptable to new interfaces as they become available.

Principally the rewrite allows greater flexibility and accuracy, and also the ability to perform a greater variety of audience segmentation based on business needs and goals.

Now if only I can find me a starship...

• New Communications Forum 2008, 22-25 April 08 at The Vineyard Creek Inn & Spa, Sonoma County CA
• San Francisco Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, 4-7 May 08
• International Communication Association's Communicating for Social Impact, the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association at Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22-26, 2008
• SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08
• Training: Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08