In the next era of connection, the corresponding scenes are no longer pure virtual scenes such as WeChat, e-commerce, online games, but rather physical scenes such as communities, office buildings, commercial complexes, schools, hospitals, etc. The core new scene is the smart community. However, at present, the smart community still faces multiple obstacles, such as owners and the property industry, in terms of actual landing, which needs to be optimized and improved.
New technologies create new connections and new scenarios;
New connections and new scenarios form new traffic;
New traffic makes new business giants.
Now that IoT, 5G, and AI are coming together, all have high expectations. What are the new connections and new scenarios that belong to them? Where will the new traffic be? Who is likely to become the new king?
I. Trend: Big changes under the wave of new technologies
Twenty years ago, the Internet came and made BAT.
10 years ago, the mobile Internet came and made Apple, WeChat, and TMD.
A major change once in 10 years will be on time.
The Internet has changed from an obscure military technology to a huge force to change the world, because it has connected a large number of people to the network with a new connection method, which has changed the direction of the river of traffic. The mobile Internet reinforces this trend. Now, the "super combination" of IoT (data acquisition), 5G (data transmission), and AI (data processing) has come, and they will realize the interconnection of everything.
This is the next-generation connection. The corresponding scenarios are no longer pure virtual scenarios such as WeChat, e-commerce, and online games. Hospital (medical) and other physical scenes. These new physical scenarios supported by IoT, 5G, and AI are often labeled "smart", which is what we call smart communities, smart parks, smart schools, and smart hospitals.
The core new scene is undoubtedly the smart community. The community is made up of families. Home is the most important thing for everyone, taking up the most time and carrying the most emotions. Communities are geographically the same concept as home. They are closest to home and have the closest connection to home. Smart communities can accommodate the most business and have the most imagination.
The development of IoT, 5G, and AI will generate some definite trends. From these trends, we can see the great potential of smart communities to become new traffic:
First of all, there will definitely be more and more facilities in the community. This is a fact. At present, whether it is a smart community related product or a smart home product, it is in a stage of rapid growth.
Second, based on the strong concurrent processing capabilities of 5G, all these facilities and equipment can be connected to achieve information exchange, which means that there will be more and more interaction between people and the community. At the same time, the transmission speed of 5G has been greatly improved, making it possible for many services that had to be face-to-face to be carried out in different places. Many of these services that can be carried out in different places are most suitable for falling in the community.
Third, AI will become more powerful. Based on AI's powerful information processing capabilities, it can not only efficiently process a large amount of information from various types of hardware, but also provide a variety of new services at the pure software level to enhance the community service experience.
To sum up, there are 5 "certain":
1.There must be more and more hardware in the community;
2.All of these hardware can be connected to the Internet;
3.There must be a large number of services that had to be carried out face-to-face before can be carried out in different places within the community;
4. Based on the previous 3 points, people must have more and more connections in the community;
5. AI must make the connected experience better and better.
The Internet of Everything creates a large number of connections between the community and the owner, enough to change the flow of traffic again. It's like you need to deal with a person often, and every time you feel good, you will naturally trust that person. Once trust is established, transactions are natural. A smart community is by no means a hardware-level opportunity, but a transformational-level opportunity to achieve a new giant.
Not only are technology development trends turning community scenes into new flows, but also some large social development trends. For example: China will become the world ’s largest consumer market in the future, and it will need more “pervasive” traffic channels; education, big health, and elderly care will become China ’s fastest-growing industries. These industries and communities have many points of integration, and need to set up frontier positions in the community The urbanization process has passed the "barbaric growing season" and entered the "refined" stage. In addition to living, the community will have to assume more functions.
The builders of smart communities are mainly technology companies and property (real estate) companies. Both are indispensable, and they are both cooperative and competitive. The advantages of technology companies are capital, talents, and technology, and the advantages of property are monopoly. It seems that technology companies have more advantages, but properties are more irreplaceable. Moreover, for technology companies, smart communities are business, and for properties, building smart communities is not only business, but also self-upgrading. Therefore, focusing on real estate companies can reduce fighting and form the largest joint force, and the construction of smart communities is the fastest.
In the eyes of major technology companies, smart communities have become an important battleground for traffic, and cooperation with real estate and property is increasing. For example, Tencent, in cooperation with Country Garden to build an artificial intelligence community, and Evergrande to form the Hengteng network, and also established a Heiner platform dedicated to the community; JD.com and 360 also strategically invested in the first lottery life of property.
Second, the essence: experience and efficiency
The essence of business competition is to compare experience and efficiency.
From the perspective of experience, it is best to get everything at home, and at the same time, the effect is no worse or even better than going to the scene.
从效率的角度来说，社区有大量相似的人群和相似的需求，整合空间很大，效率提升空间很大。
Take fresh food as an example. Fresh food e-commerce has been delivered for half an hour in first-tier cities, but in order to achieve "fast", a large number of front warehouses need to be configured, which is expensive, so it is not cheap. If the owner aggregates the fresh demand to the community (on-demand) every day, and directly distributes (direct) the community as a unit (batch) and then distributes it to the household or the owner picks it up at a fixed pickup point, the efficiency must be the highest and fixed The investment is small. Although a little flexibility is sacrificed in terms of experience, the price advantage will be obvious.
On-demand, batch, and direct are the three keywords of community retail. On-demand can ensure freshness and reduce losses; when the source (city first-class vegetable market) is the same and the destination (community) is the same, batch distribution is obviously better than scattered distribution, and direct delivery must be more than transit (tiered market or front Warehouse) efficient. This model requires both the community and the fresh food supply system to achieve a high degree of informatization and communication with each other. This all depends on the large-scale application of IoT, 5G, and AI in the community and fresh food field.
The community group buying in full swing in 2018 is similar to this idea, except that the main implementation body is the treasure mother in the community. In addition to freshness, there are many categories of goods with similar logic. Even the core category of e-commerce, such as clothing, may be harvested by the community. Many stores now have smart fitting mirrors. With the advancement of technology (AI + AR), it is bound to become more realistic. If the smart fitting mirror is immersive, its best application scenario may not be the store, it may be the community. Look at the clothes you want online, and then you can go to the smart fitting mirror in the community to try them on virtually every day, and finally choose to buy them. This can greatly improve the frequency and efficiency of fitting, and find the best balance between physical experience and network efficiency. It is estimated that chopping hands will become more and more irresistible.
Not only the retail of goods, but also the service industry will be transferred to the community under the blessing of new technologies. 5G will make VR truly usable and start to spread. With all kinds of intelligent hardware such as springing up, education, big health, retirement, finance, entertainment, etc. can use this wave of technology dividends to realize alienation. Many services that must be face-to-face now can be moved to the community in the future, which can significantly reduce the cost of obtaining services for owners and improve the efficiency of these service industries. Do n’t worry about the experience. With 5G and constantly upgraded hardware, it ’s not far away.
So why can't the above mentioned hardware be directly moved into the owner's home? It can also be, if it is cheap enough, but it is estimated that it has to wait. Moreover, the frequency of use, venue, and communication must be considered, so moving into the community for sharing is the best choice.
Whether it is retail or service industry, community scene can fully experience the application of new technology to enhance and improve efficiency. Still skeptical of the wisdom of their community who can do a "tortured soul": you can get the products and services you need in the community, but also cheaper than outside, are you unhappy Stuck human nature, human nature has not changed?. Since the take-away can be so fast to grow and support groups over 60 billion US dollars in market capitalization, we can only believe that human nature is lazy, and believe that the wisdom of the community can prop up a very huge market.
Third, edge services: a challenge to the reconstruction of imagination
Edge services are borrowing the concept of edge computing. Edge computing is relatively closer to the application side than cloud computing. In the field of property, Country Garden Services and Hikvision jointly developed the edge computing server "AI Phoenix Magic Box". Various devices in the community can share this edge server and use it to obtain cloud-based algorithms to achieve intelligence.
"Edge service" is similar to edge computing. The service platform configures "edge" devices closer to consumers in the community to serve the owners of the neighborhood. The "edge" can inherit service capabilities from the "cloud" through hardware, and there is no need or only a small number of service personnel to be configured locally. With the development of intelligent hardware, the aforementioned service industry can be developed in the form of "edge services".
In the past, the world of the Internet was mainly "cloud" and "terminal", and "edge" will be added later. This restructuring started by new technologies will profoundly change many industries and create many new species. The community and the "edge" are a perfect match. Owners in the same community have many similarities. Edge services can find the best balance between personalization and efficiency in the community.
For example, extra-curricular education, daily medical examinations, fitness and health care, and various financial services can rely on related equipment to enter the community in the form of edge services. E-commerce can also set up edge services in the community through smart fitting lenses. For services with similar processes, multiple vendors can also share edge service equipment, which can further reduce costs. For example, financial edge services can be shared by multiple financial institutions, similar to ATMs that support UnionPay; smart fitting lenses can also be shared by multiple e-commerce platforms.
Compared to small shops or various branches around the community, edge services mainly rely on hardware. From a trend perspective, a large part of the services currently provided by people will be replaced by machines sooner or later, and machines can also create many new services and new scenarios. In the case of hardware-based, no or a small number of people are needed, the major platforms are integrated into smart communities in the form of edge services to carry out joint operations, which must be the most efficient model.
Fourth, the community operating system: the underlying architecture and killer of smart communities
The underlying architecture of a smart community should be based on all the hardware in the community and an "operating system" built on all service personnel, which can carry various applications based on community scenarios.
All the hardware here includes the smart home in the owner's home. Because the home and the surrounding environment (community) are inseparable, or the home and the community are combined to have a better experience. For example, if your home ’s smart door lock detects illegal unlocking and alerts you, then what should you do? If there is no one in the house, you can only call the police, but the police will take time to arrive; Questions.
If the smart door lock and smart community are combined and any illegal intrusion is found to be submitted to the community, the community will immediately arrange a security visit to the door, call the police at the same time, and gather all the security on standby. This can not only find the problem in time, but also effectively solve the problem. Another example, when you go out and say "I want to go out" to the smart speaker, the smart speaker submits the information to the community, and the community immediately arranges the elevator to your floor, which is definitely a cool feature for users of high-rise buildings. In addition to calling the smart speaker, the smart speaker can of course call the service staff, and the community will arrange for the on-site service in time.
When the community's "operating system" is established, the smart community has the ability to integrate smart homes. Smart home is a well-recognized trend. In 2018, the output value exceeded 100 billion yuan, and it is expected to exceed 500 billion by 2023, attracting many manufacturers to enter, and also brings problems of compatibility and integration. No matter who is the final integrator, it is necessary to carry out in-depth cooperation with the smart community, because if the smart home is separated from the smart community, the smart home experience will be much worse, which is enough to determine the owner's choice in the competition.
Assume that two smart home companies A and B compete in the same community, and their cost performance is at the same level. Company A agreed to integrate its products in the APP of the smart community, while Company B insisted on using its own app. The community agreed to open the full capabilities of the smart community to A, but closed it completely to B. It is not difficult to infer that Company A will inevitably gain an advantage in the competition, because consumers do not care which APP is used at all, but only whether the experience is better.
In the same way, when autonomous driving and connected cars become popular, this operating system must also be connected, because the use scenarios of cars are also closely related to the community. There are still many such applications, but the only thing missing is the brain hole. Every platform and business that thinks about community gold rush, and various edge services need to access this "operating system."
There is also a self-reinforcing growth flywheel between the operating system and applications: the more applications, the stronger the system; the stronger the system, the more applications. When the smart community opens its software and hardware and personnel capabilities to the outside world in the form of an "operating system", the smart community has its own irreplaceable killer and has a strong voice in industrial integration.
V. Predicament: What is the crux of standing still?
Just as the early Internet would encounter a bubble, the development of smart communities was not smooth.
As of September 2019, there have been 16 property companies listed on Hong Kong and A shares. From the public financial report, the value-added services of the community accounted for a small proportion of total revenue, which means that the value of the flow of smart communities has not Be reflected. Country Garden Services (a country company's property company) with the largest property market value, its community value-added services account for less than 10%; Cai Life is the pioneer of community value-added services, and its proportion has not exceeded 20%.
From the proposal of the community O2O concept to the listing of Cai Life, and today the property has become a listed sector. In the past 10 years, head real estate companies have been working hard to convert community traffic and develop value-added services. According to the theory of community O2O, community value-added services should become the main income of property companies, and property fees should be reduced to supporting roles or even cancelled. But contrary to expectations, community value-added services seem to be stuck in place and have not broken through for years.
Objectively speaking, head property companies are not enthusiastic about trying new models and applying new technologies, but the effects are not obvious. Technically, the applications of IoT, 5G, and AI are still in the initial stage, and no obvious connection effect can be produced for the time being. But its maturity is only a matter of time. To solve the problem, it is necessary to find the cause from the property industry itself, mainly two points:
1. Owner satisfaction is not high enough
It is a fact that the property owner's overall satisfaction level is not high enough, but in fact, it can't be a monster company. Everything between the property and the owner can be divided into three categories:
(1) The job of the property, that is, the things stipulated by laws and regulations and property management contracts.
(2) The owner believes that the property should be managed, but in fact the property has no right to control or cannot control it.
(3) The owner did not expect the property to do it, but what the property can do for the owner.
As far as the first job is concerned, there are actually many property companies that do a good job. The main problem lies in the second item, such as: the occupation or damage of public resources, neighborhood disputes, municipal issues and so on. When encountering such things, the owner can only find the property, or the most convenient way to find the property. From the owner's point of view, this is also the job of the property. In fact, it is not that the property does not have corresponding law enforcement and jurisdiction. All it can do is communicate, but the impression to the owner is to evade responsibility and intentionally do nothing. In the newly developed community, there is still a problem of rights protection, and the property is also a pot-sold man. All of these have caused a crack in trust between the property and the owner, and this situation will not be fundamentally improved in the short term.
Even if the job is done well, the second item score is very low, and the overall score is definitely not high. If you want to increase the total score, you can only rely on the third item. That is, the owner did not expect the property to do it, but the property did it. It constantly provided the owner with an unexpected experience, sought benefits for the owner, and made the owner feel the community warm.
This third type of thing is the key to improving the satisfaction of the owners. Specifically, it is to continuously upgrade the community and provide more quality services to the owners, that is, to build smart communities and carry out community value-added services. Spending money on the smart transformation of the community will definitely win the favor of the owners. The same is true for value-added services. Not only will it be the main source of income in the future, but it will also be an important means of improving owner satisfaction.
2. Problems with the property team
The first is that frontline employees are not willing enough to serve subjectively, and objectively they are not capable of serving.
The property company is currently a labor-intensive enterprise. The wage level of front-line jobs is not high, the labor intensity is not low, and the daily tasks are community chores. The attraction is not great, and the employees are average in service initiative and enthusiasm.
In addition, the incentives provided by front-line employees for real-estate companies are not enough. Now the income of real-estate companies is dominated by property fees. Property fees are basically fixed and will not increase due to the improvement of service quality. If high rewards are given to employees, it means that the company's revenue will decrease, which will certainly be difficult to achieve.
A large property company usually has a large number of employees. A wrong logic is: I have so many employees and have a lot of contact points with the owner. I can sell many things and provide many services through the employees in the community. Practice has proven that this idea is wrong. Although the number of teams is large but unprofessional, and the motivation is insufficient, it lacks competitiveness. Even if companies use executive orders to pressure performance indicators, they rarely have a real boost.
Internal integration was not in place, and the limited combat effectiveness was fragmented
Large property companies have communities throughout the country and are generally divided into regional levels. After entering the capital market, mergers and acquisitions often occur. Due to geographical separation, these regional branches and M & A companies actually have greater autonomy, especially when it comes to value-added services. At present, there are very few ways for the property company headquarters to reach the owners directly, mainly through local teams in various communities. The headquarters and the owners are basically isolated. Therefore, rather than the property company doing the value-added services, it is better to say that each local team is doing it.
Not only are capabilities not integrated, interests are also not uniform.
Take the example of a parking service. Property companies are currently vigorously promoting the intelligent transformation of parking lots. Data show that: before and after transformation, parking income increased by an average of 30%, and the increase rate was even more than double. Are there more cars parked after the renovation? Obviously not. It can only be that the headquarters does not know the actual parking situation before the transformation, and some income is not counted. Who took that part of the income? The answer is also obvious.
To sum up, the problems of insufficient owner satisfaction, lack of competitiveness of the team, fragmentation of capacity, and mountainization of interests have made it difficult to make breakthroughs in value-added services and buried the traffic value of the community. Solving these problems requires the property to upgrade itself. The property is composed of communities. Building a smart community and self-upgrading of the property are essentially the same thing. These problems will be solved with the completion of the smart community. In the next section, we will explore how to build a smart community.
Article Source: The Internet of Things World http://www.iotworld.com.cn/html/News/201910/c2c2dd6540d35d7b.shtml
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