Tag: enterprise

Google Wave will take a generation

June 1, 2009 / elias

Chris Saad used to ask me questions about tech in enterprise due to my history (I’ve got the battle scars rolling out web2.0 at PwC), but he asked me after he wrote this post. So instead of telling him he’s wrong by email (ironic given the topic), I’m going to shame him to the world!

Why Google Wave will take over ten years to turn into a trending wave
As I previously wrote when the news of Google’s new technology was announced, there is a hidden detail Google hasn’t announced to the world: it requires massive computational power to pull off. It doesn’t take a brain to realise it either – anyone thats used a bloated Instant Messenger (like Lotus Same Time) probably understands this. All that rich media, group chat, real time – Jesus, how many fans are we going to need now to blow the steam generated by our computer processors? Mozilla pioneered tabbed browsing – and it’s still trying to pioneer on the same idea – from your computer crashing when you have more than a few tabs open!

Don’t get me wrong, Google Wave is phenomenal. But it’s only the beginning. The fact Google has opened this up to the world is a good thing. But we need to be realistic, because even if this technology is distributed (like how email is), the question I want to know is how many users can one server support? I’d be surprised at these early stages if it’s more than a dozen (the demo itself showed there’s still a lot of work to be done). Do I have inside knowledge? No – just common sense and experience with every other technology I’ve used to date.

Why Google Wave won’t hit the enterprise in the next 12 months
Now to the point where Saad is *really* wrong. “20% of enterprise users will be using wave in the first 12 months for more than 50% of their comms (replacing email and wiki)“.

Yeah right. It’s going to take at least three years, with a stable and mature technology, for this to work. Email sucks, but it also works. IT departments, especially in this economy, are not going to try a new form of communication that’s half working and is not a mass adopted technology (wiki’s are a new thing – there’s a cultural battle still being fought within enterprises).

The real time nature potentially might even scare communications departments. Entire divisions exist in firms like mine, to control the message sent to employees. If you are revealing a message before the final message has been crafted, you’ve given away control to that message – the process now becomes just as important as the final message. I understand this functionality can be turned off, but I’m raising it to highlight how enterprises think.

Google Wave rocks
Again, don’t get me wrong. Google Wave blows my mind. But let’s be realistic here – big ideas take time. It took a while for Google the search engine to domiante. Heck, Gmail has taken nearly a decade to get to the point of being called dominant. And you can fix bugs, deploy software, and roll out sales teams – but sometimes with big ideas, it’s a generational thing.

Wave will dominate our world communications – one day. But not for a while.

John Hagel – What do you think is the single most important question after everything is connected?

September 8, 2007 / elias

I recently was pointed to a presentation of John Hagel who is a renowned strategy consultant and author on the impact the Internet has on business. He recently joined Deloitte and Touche, where he will head a new Silicon Valley research institute. At the conference (Supernova 2007), John outlined critical research questions regarding the future of digital business that remain unresolved, which revolved around the following:

What happens after everything is connected? What are the most important questions?

I had to watch the video a few times because its not possible to capture everything he says in one hit. So I started writing notes each time, which I have reproduced below to help guide your thoughts and give a summary as you are watching the presentation (which I highly recommend).

I also have discovered (after writing these notes – damn it!) that he has written his speech (slightly different however) and posted it on his blog. I’ll try and reference my future postings on these themes here, by pinging or adding links to this posting.
Continue reading

The attention economy needs a consistent base

June 10, 2007 / elias

Okay, enough naval gazing. The journalist in me (by experience), the accountant in me (by education), and the businessman in me (by occupation) is going to synthesise my understanding of the world and propose a new metric for the attention economy. I don’t know the answer yet, but I am going to use this blog to develop my thinking. I can’t promise a solution, however I am sure breaking the issue down into key requirements, assumptions, and needs of what this magical metric is – will add value somewhere for someone.

So let’s start with the most important assumption of all: what are we measuring? As Herbert Simon coined it, and smart guys like Umair, Scott and Chris have extended (at least for my conceptual understanding) – it is called the attention economy. It is important to note however, that the attention economy is an aspect of the Information Sector (see below). And as I described in a previous posting, the attention economy needs a metric for two reasons: monetisation and feedback.

What incorporates the attention economy? Well, this is a bit like a related problem I had when I first came to grips with what new media was. A few years back, I did some active research trying to understand how a book, a television, a newspaper, and a search engine – could all somehow be classed as “media”. I found my question answered by Vin Crosbie’s manifesto (read this for a recent summary). Take note of what he considers is the key element of new media (the technology aspect).

I am going to propose one of my key assumptions of the future, which will answer this question. It might not happen for another 5, 10 or even 20 years – but I am convinced this is the future. The Internet will act as infrastructure.

I believe the unifying aspect, and the backbone of the attention economy, will be the Internet. All enterprise software, all consumer software, all (distributed) entertainment, all (distributed) communications and all information – will be delivered digitally over the Internet. I think the people at the US Census bureau?Ç? conceptually have already worked this out by defining the information sector of the economy, which classes the above mentioned and more into this one diverse category. The Internet is the enabler of the Information Age, just like how the production line was for the Industrial Age

I’m not saying we are going to live, sleep, and eat on computers in the future. However just think – anything that runs on electricity, can connect to the Internet. And look at the technologies being developed that enable the Internet to live beyond the computer screen like electronic paper and?Ç? dynamic interfaces. Even more powerfully, is that the Internet has brought entire industries to their knees – like the newspaper and music industries – because it is providing a more efficient way of delivering content. If it’s information, communication or entertainment related – then it probably works better in digital format, over the Internet. (Excluding of course the things like theme parks and the like, which are more about physical entertainment and not distributed entertainment like a television programme).

I think this is an important issue to be recognised, that the Internet will the the backbone of the attention economy. By being the core back-end, it means that no matter the output device – whether it is mobile phone, a computer, or a television – it will be providing a consistent delivery mechanism for digital information. For a measurement system to work, it needs to be consistent. The Internet infrastructure will be that consistency. If you can recognise that, then that is a big step forward to solving the issue.

Faraday Media – Particls

May 28, 2007 / elias

This series of blog posts – wizards of oz – is to highlight the innovation we have down under. So I begin with Faraday media, a Brisbane based start-up that launched their keynote product today,

Particls is an engine that learns what you are interested in, and alerts you when content on the internet becomes available – through a desktop ‘ticker’ or pop-up alerts.

Value
1) It’s targeted. Particls is an attention engine – it learns what you want to read, and then goes and finds relevant information. That’s a powerful tool, for those of us drowning in information overload, and who don’t have time to read.

2) It catches your attention. Particls is based on the concept of ‘alerts’ – information trickles across your screen seemlesly as you do your work, like a news ticker. For the things that matter, an alert will pop-up. The way you deal with information overload is not by shutting yourself out – it’s by adjusting the volume on things that you value more than other things.

3) The founders understand privacy. They started the APML standard – a workgroup I joined because it’s the best attempt I have seen yet that tackles the issue of privacy on the internet. For example, I can see what the Particls attention engine uses to determine my preferences – lists of people and subjects with “relevance scores”. And better yet – it’s stored on my hard-disk.

4) It’s simple. RSS is a huge innovation on the web, that only a minority of users on the internet understand. The problem with RSS (Real Simple Syndication), is that it’s not simple. Particles makes it dead simple to add RSS and track that content.

Conclusion

Why the hell doesn’t Fairfax acquire the start-up, rather than wasting time creating yet another publication (incidently in the same city) that we don’t have time to read. In my usage of the product, I have been introduced to content that I am interested in, that I never would have realised had existed on the web. In my trials, I have mainly used it to keep track of my research interests, and despite my skepticism about how ‘good’ the the attention engine is, it has absolutely blown me away.

And it’s not just in the consumer space – a colleague (who happens to hold a lot of influence in enterprise architecture of our 140,000 person firm) was blasting RSS one day on an internal blog – saying how we don’t yet have the technology to ‘filter’ information. I told him about Particls – he’s now in love. If a guy like him, who shapes IT strategy for a $20 billion consulting firm, can get that excited – that’s got to tell you something.

Have you tried to implement enterprise blogging?

May 26, 2007 / elias

Martianus: Hey guys, I think the earth goes around the sun.

Establishment: Don’t be ridiculous – everything revolves around the earth. Your idea sucks. Get back to work and let us take care of astrology, because we know best.

Nicholas: Dudes – seriously. It doesn’t make sense. Why don’t we take a different approach?

Establishment (between themselves): We’ve got a problem. These kids think that the earth moves and goes around the sun – as if someone was sitting in a car still, and the earth and trees walked and moved! Ridiculous!

Galileo: Hey I’ve been speaking to a lot of people, and everyone reckons the earth orbits the sun. It’s so painfully obvious. Can we please update our textbooks?

Establishment: Excuse me? Have you not looked at Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and Chronicles 16:30 that state “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.” It’s how we’ve always said it. We can’t let you challenge the Holy Book. The Holy Book is law, and only we can interpret it.

Galileo: What’s the big deal? I mean, I’m just saying something that makes sense. Look – everyone else is saying it. It’s not like I’m suggesting we need to implement blogging within our enterprise, to unlock our potential. Now that would be ridiculous!

Establishment: Listen – there is no point changing our world view. If we started telling people that, could you imagine? A famine would start, and nineteen percent of people would get a heart-attack because of the dangers of thinking like that – we can’t take that risk. The father almighty in his wrath would shake our flat earth, and ruin our existence. Even if it were true, why change? It’s not like it would make any difference. Now scram.

Galileo: You guys don’t get it – it could really help people, and it’s not a big deal. I can’t believe the fuss.

Establishment (between themselves): I don’t get what this kid is on. Let go and tell his superiors to have a word with him. We can’t have this type of thing happening again.

Two hundred years later
Establishment: Yes thank you – we are the pioneers. Our team took some risky moves to experiment with a new way of doing things early on – we often forget that it was us, the establishment, that started all this. If it wasn’t for us realising things needed to change, so much innovation would never have occurred. Just think – Einstein never would have worked out the theory of relativity. Thank God for the establishment and the foresight we continue to have this day.

Patents: more harm than good

April 15, 2007 / elias

When I was in Prague two years ago, I met a bloke from Bristol (UK) that very convincingly explained how patents as a concept, are stupid. Because alcohol was involved, I can’t recall his actual argument, but it has since made me question: do you really need a patent to protect your business idea?

Narendra Rocherolle, an experienced entrepreneur, has written a good little article explaining when you should, and shouldn’t, spend money to protect your IP. Racherolle offers a good analysis, but I am going to extend it by stating that a patent can be dangerous for your business, and not just because of the monetary cost. Radar Networks is my case-study – a stealth-mode “Semantic web” company, that has received a lot of press lately because apparently they are doing something big but they are not going to tell us until later this year.