Day: June 13, 2005

Mass Collaboration

Business Week’s special issue of the InfoTech 100 leads with a story on mass co-operation:

The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide — long with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more — are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. “There’s a fundamental shift in power happening,” says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. “Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they’re involved in.”

TV Reloaded

Slashdot points to Newsweek:

Tomorrow’s television? Now we’re talking vast. Start with the screenswide, flat, high-definition monsters that delineate tire treads on NASCAR rigs and zits on an anchorperson’s chinand move to the programming choices, which will expand from a lousy 200 or so channels to tens of thousands of ’em, if you figure in video-on-demand (VOD). It’ll be a cosmic video jukebox where you can fire up old episodes of “Cop Rock,” the fifth game of the 1993 World Series, a live high-school lacrosse game, a ranting video blogger and your own HD home-movie production of Junior’s first karate tournament. While it’s playing, you can engage in running voice commentary with your friends, while in a separate part of the screen you’re slamming orcs in World of Warcraft. Then you can pay your bill on screen. And if you ever manage to leave your home theater, you can monitor the whole shebang in your car, at a laptop at Starbucks or via the laundry-ticket-size screen on your cell phone. The ethos of New TV can be captured in a single sweeping mantra: anything you want to see, any time, on any device. “We are at a watershed moment in home entertainment,” says Brian Roberts, CEO of the cable giant Comcast.

To paraphrase sci-fi author William Gibson, the TV future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Early adopters have jumped on the new stuff because they offer two qualities traditionally lacking in the fading era of broadcast television: personalization and empowerment. All of which is worse news than a crummy Nielsen rating for the major networks, whose market share has already plummeted in the past decade.

Wired Friedman Interview

Wired has an interview with Tom Friedman by Daniel Pink:

WIRED: What do you mean the world is flat?
FRIEDMAN: I was in India interviewing Nandan Nilekani at Infosys. And he said to me, “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” Indians and Chinese were going to compete for work like never before, and Americans weren’t ready. I kept chewing over that phrase – the playing field is being leveled – and then it hit me: Holy mackerel, the world is becoming flat. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance – or soon, even language.

So, we’re talking about globalization enhanced by things like the rise of open source?
This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There’s a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It’s a difference in degree that’s so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

Why are supply chains so important?
They’re incredible flatteners. For UPS to work, they’ve got to create systems with customs offices around the world. They’ve got to design supply chain algorithms so when you take that box to the UPS Store, it gets from that store to its hub and then out. Everything they are doing is taking fat out of the system at every joint. I was in India after the nuclear alert of 2002. I was interviewing Vivek Paul at Wipro shortly after he’d gotten an email from one of their big American clients saying, “We’re now looking for an alternative to you. We don’t want to be looking for an alternative to you. You don’t want us to be looking for an alternative to you. Do something about this!” So I saw the effect that India’s being part of this global supply chain had on the behavior of the Indian business community, which eventually filtered up to New Delhi.

The book is almost dizzily optimistic about India and China, about what flattening will bring to these parts of the world.
I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt. Bill Gates has a nice line: He says, 20 years ago, would you rather have been a B-student in Poughkeepsie or a genius in Shanghai? Twenty years ago you’d rather be a B-student in Poughkeepsie. Today?

Not even close.
Not even close. You’d much prefer to be the genius in Shanghai because you can now export your talents anywhere in the world.

Merged Web Interfaces on Mobiles

Paul Golding writes:

I often imagine a phone interface that is simply a search-box, as bare and stripped down as the Google front page.

Most of the time I would be entering search strings based on names. However, unlike a search engine, there would be no need to hit “search” or “return”. I imagine that the search “results” would appear below the box in real-time as I typed the search term, just like some devices do already (6600, Blackberry etc.)

However, the names would actually be stored on the web, not on the phone. I would have a personal address book and I could also belong to shared address books. Of course, data would have to be cached, otherwise delays would be too great compared to a locally stored book. [Updated books (via the web) would have already been downloaded pre-emptively.]

Why isn’t this available? Or is it? Why do I have to bother with the idea of “synchronisation”? And why isn’t it possible to have the search box for contacts as my home page on the phone? After all, the most common action done with a mobile phone must be contacting someone (text or call).

Perhaps with careful design of a search interface and results ranking, both service discovery and usage will become not only more manageable for users, but more profitable for operators. Even now, there are perhaps lots of mobile services that we simply don’t know about, unless one dares to hunt around on the operator’s website. I’m a great believer in the “bump into effect” which says that you are more likely to use something if you bump into it, than if it is tidied away in some corner, real or virtual.

TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: A Changing World

On April 19, I become a father. 37 years separate Abhishek and me. We are products of two different worlds. As I thought about the world Abhishek will grow up in, I started thinking about the world I grew up in. And out of all this thinking emerged this letter

Dear Abhishek,

Welcome to the World. As I hold you in my arms, I am thinking of the world around you that you will make your own in the years to come. It will be some time before you begin to understand the world around you. Hopefully, when that times, this letter will help you make some sense of where we once were and where we are going.

Atanu Dey says: Life is a Random Draw. In which case, you have much to be thankful for. You have been born in India, a country that has a great legacy, and even greater potential. While India slept through much of the second half of the previous century, the elephant is now showing signs of waking up. With a billion fellow countrymen, it had better! We are still a poor country, though you are fortunate enough to be among the countrys elite upper class. The top of the pyramid, as they say. And you better make use of this luck of the draw to make a difference in the world.

As I look at you, I cannot but think of the contrasts. Take your birth, for example. What I definitely know is that my father definitely did not do what I did to you take a photo with a phone and have it up on the Internet for family and friends to see within a few hours of your birth. In fact, as soon as you were born, I was on my mobile phone, informing everyone even while your mother was in the operation theatre. By the time you reached the hospital nursery about 15 minutes later, all notifications were done some via voice, and others by SMS. A few hours later, your photos were on the Net for all to see. A few days later, you were the subject of a blog post that drew plenty of comments from all over the world. So much has changed between our births.

Through this letter, I want to share some of my thoughts on this changing world. Hopefully, by understanding where we came from, you will also be able to make this world better. Because there is still a lot to be done. From tackling poverty to searching for sources of alternative energy, the world needs even more innovation and entrepreneurship. There are so many elements in todays world that are unrecognisable from the world in which I was born. For example, desktop computers, mobiles and the Internet didnt exist when I was born and already today, I cannot imagine a day in my life without any of them). I wonder what the equivalent innovations and advances will be in your life. Nanotech? Intelligent Machines? Quantum computing? Or something we cannot even imagine today? Whatever it is, you are going to grow up in amazingly interesting times. Because the only constant in this world is Change. And you are going to get plenty of it even as you grow up.

Tomorrow: Then and Now