June 24, 2005 – Emergic

Personalisation

We are overwhelmed by all the information coming at us in our daily lives. We need something that makes sense of the chaos, that orders and filters the information streams.

Personalization must be part of this vision. Search can help you find things when you already know what you want; personalization helps surface useful information when you don’t already know what you want.

Personalization offers a way to find focus. It learns what you like, shows you what you want to see, and filters out the rest. It extracts knowledge from the information chaos and helps you get the information you need.

New Media

MiniMediaGuy writes:

What is different about making media now?

First there is the issue of scale. The size of the enterprise required to make media, and the size of the batches of information and cultural products have both shrunk. People can now do on desktops what it took large organizations to previously accomplish. Mass audiences have also fragmented into niches. I call this phenomenon Mini Media. Call it what you like, I think scale is the primary difference between media manufacturing today and in the past.

Second, I would add interactivity. The potential for instant feedback is a characteristic of web-based publishing enterprises, and one that offers them a competitive advantage over pre-existing mass media. Interactivity creates new ways to make media. You may be familiar with the self-defined concept of user-generated content. In the old days, this meant letters to the editor. Nowadays people are creating and sharing videos and other media. Clever firms can leverage this viewer-added-value to create what I think of as a Tom Sawyer business model. You remember how Tom suckered his neighborhood pals into whitewashing a fence by making it seem like fun. Generally speaking, manufacturing may be regarded as dull but making media has sex appeal that can be used to advantage.

Scale and interactivity, taken together, create a third novelty of the new media-making environment customization. Technology allows us to create personalized media products. My Yahoo is an obvious example in Web publishing. But technology also makes it possible to produce small and even single copies of physical media artifacts such as books or magazines. Music lovers think nothing about creating personal play lists on portable listening devices. Small and large publishers alike must embrace customization and personalization in order to succeed.

When I think of scale, interactivity and customization as a group, they suggests a fourth characteristic that distinguishes todays media-manufacturing environment. I call this multi-modal publishing.

Microformats and Web 2.0

The Community Engine Blog writes:

In the last year, many centralized services have sprung up to facilitate tagging bookmarks and other web artifacts, for instance flickr, del.icio.us, and most recently feedster. These services have the following characteristics:

* They focus on the value to the individual user. With the best of these services, it easy and even fun to tag and share items. Further, tagging is sufficiently compelling at the individual level to motivate people to do it.
* They provide further value by aggregating tagging and annotation across users. In all of these services, users can see how others are tagging items they are viewing, an aggregation of all of the tags available, and items classified by tag. All of these activities become more valuable the larger the network or group of people participating, leading to a positive network effect.
* Their most obvious potential business model is based on exclusive access to the network. It is not so much that the services lock in individual user data but that you must go to them for the aggregation. For instance, it is very easy to export data from del.icio.us. However, only by using del.icio.us do you gain access to the aggregate of del.icio.us users.

In order to complete the value proposition centralized services offer to users, standalone players need some sort of aggregator to help them combine forces. A well-accepted, standard format that makes the smaller players’ data easy to aggregate will facilitate the emergence of aggregators. xFolk is meant to provide just this format.

Once a microformat like xFolk has been adopted, smaller players will still be very much able to compete with the likes of del.icio.us and flickr on user experience. Other players will emerge to compete with the current leaders on tag aggregation, much like technorati has already started to do at a very small scale. Folksonomy publishers and consumers will win because they have more choice of outlet. Players currently enjoying an advantage based on trying to maintain exclusive access to user networks will see that advantage erode.

Google Ad Exchange

[via SearchEngineWatch Blog] MarketWatch wonders:

EBay is already an exchange where buyers and sellers meet to trade stuff — from Pez dispensers, cars to homes. Imagine if it became a marketplace platform where ad buyers and ad sellers transacted business. Think of the cut that eBay would get!

Alas, Google is already well on its way to becoming such an exchange.

Google already has AdWords, which helps marketers place their advertisements on Google’s search-results page and a growing list of content publications, like blogs. On the flipside, Google’s AdSense helps online publishers make available their real estate so Google can plaster ads on them.

But imagine a more automated world in which online publishers place their inventory on Google’s exchange. Online advertisers could choose, in an a la carte format, where they wanted to place their ads — whether they wanted to buy keywords across a number of sites, or if they wanted to simply choose a specific site.

Google would sit in the middle and take a cut of all the transactions.

This is a good context to think about Google’s rumoured launch of its payment services (like PayPal) and classifieds (like Craigslist).

Mobile vs PC Web

Michael Parekh writes:

The carriers, especially in the US, will be increasingly pressured from five directions to open up their platforms:

1. Consumers, who will demand more access, at affordable, generally flat pricing to the web via their mobile device.
2. The handset manufacturers, who need to increasingly behave like their PC brethren to keep their price points high in a Moore’s law driven commodity business, i.e., stuff in more functionality at the same or lower price. This means cram in hard drives, faster processors, more memory, better input systems, chipsets that support multiple wireless networks (traditional cell of all flavors, next gen wireless broadband, Wi-fi, Blue-tooth, Wimax, etc.), better screens, bigger/better batteries, GPS, etc.
3. Advertisers, who will increasingly demand similar breadth and depth of inventory they are getting on the PC-driven web. They are already spending 5% of their advertising budgets online, and liking it.
4. Online content and service providers, who also will drive the availability of their offerings onto every type of mobile device off the PC.
5. Internet telephony applications will increasingly be demanded to be run on mobile devices by consumers and providers like Skype, who will expect the same cost/quality of VOIP service on their mobile device as they get on their PCs/laptops.

All this means the wireless phone business, despite their many unique characteristics, will be flattened from vertical to horizontal, just like the wired phoned business has been over the last decade. In the meantime, US consumers especially will have to make do with smaller PC based mobile devices to run the kind of apps they need.

TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: 10 Big Ideas (Part 5)

Dear Abhishek,

7. Rethinking Education

As I watch you grow, I think about how you will learn. There is more information in the world accessible to you than ever before. The mental models that you need to build are going to be much more complex than I ever had to worry about. And yet, the way we educate our children has barely changed in the past generation. That is what I worry about.

Education is perhaps the single most important factor that makes a person. We are still trying to teach children various things in our schools. We should be teaching them to learn more than anything else. But the tools we have on hand have barely evolved. Our teachers and educators have not yet understood the world that has changed so much due to developments in both computing and connectivity in the past two decades.

There is undoubtedly a need to rethink education. I dont know what the right answer is. But for now, I will leave you to ponder these thoughts by Atanu Dey: The present educational system evolved in simpler times when technologies were comparatively rudimentary. All you had were books, blackboards, and hard-copy libraries as teaching and learning tools, and live teachers giving real-time instructions. Now we have (the possibility of) broadband access to the world wide web, electronic libraries, distance education, radio, TV, CDs, DVDs. Things that were not written about or heard about just a generation ago. The tools and technological capabilities have evolved astonishingly. Therefore the educational process cannot but be subject to radical change as well.

The last three Big Ideas are quick-takes. These are still quite new, but I want to mention them here so you are at least aware of them. We have future letters to discuss them in greater detail!

8. Biotech and Nanotech

Many a person has said that the future belongs to the three techs infotech, biotech and nanotech. Much of what I have discussed so far has been in the context of infotech not because it is more important than the others, but because thats the area I understand best. In your life, however, the impact of biotech and nanotech will be equally large. So, make sure you keep track of developments in both these areas. Whether it is in the use of biology through genetics to find cures for some of the diseases that continue to afflict us or the creation of quantum computers, all I can say is that you will need to track these areas closely because there will be cross-pollination of ideas across these tech segments.

9. Personal Fabrication

I have just started reading a book by Neil Gershenfeld s book Fab, which discusses the coming era of personal fabricators, giving us the capability to make virtually anything right on our desktop. The Economist (Mar 23, 2005) wrote about Gershenfelds Fab Lab recently: Dr Gershenfeld believes the world is poised for a personal-fabrication revolution. Fab lab will, he hopes, be part of it. Just as computing power moved from million-dollar mainframes to hundred-dollar PCs, industrial-scale machinery is, in his opinion, beginning a transition to the desktop. While personal fabricators will not replace mass production, he believes that within the next few years they will allow individuals and small businesses to customise products to their needs. Am just wondering if, instead of getting you Lego blocks, I should get you a Fab Lab on your next birthday!

10. Intelligent Machines

As I watch you grow, I am fascinated by how you learn and think. At the heart of this is the brain. So, how does your brain work? That is what I am trying to figure out as I read Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence. The book describes Hawkins theory that the brain is not a computer, but a pattern-matching prediction system. The brain is intelligent because, according to Hawkins, it lets you imagine the future. So, could that help us build intelligent machines in the future? Ponder this from Business 2.0: Hawkins believes such intelligent machines are at the same stage the programmable computer was at in 1950. He ventures a prediction of his own: We can build these things faster than humans, with a deeper sense of thought, and can build them with special senses. Their sensory input won’t need to be limited to the five human senses. They could gather data from infrared, radar, magnetic, microscopic, and telescopic sources, to name a few. And their sensors need not be attached to a body. They could be spread out across vast geographies.

So, these are my 10 Big Ideas for 2005. Next week, Ill give you some tips for life.

Continue reading TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: 10 Big Ideas (Part 5)