DataPortability.org - Share and remix data using open standards. Future Exploration Network. 2008 Is The Year of Data Portability. Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted that Microsoft will be joining the Data Portability work group. Marshall and the Read/Write/Web team appear to be huge advocates of this work group. I am a huge advocate myself even though there are more questions then answers. It appears that 2008 is rapidly shaping up to be a ground-shifting year in regards to data portability.
Just last week Yahoo announced that they would begin supporting OpenId as a login standard. That has been just one of the massive steps that have taken place. For the uber-geeks, data portability is theoretically beautiful but will face significant challenges. It needs to happen though. OpenSocial has attempted to define itself as one of the leading standards. There are going to be many challenges facing the evolution of data portability but the creation of the Data Portability workgroup, will surely help to make 2008 an interesting year.
Will technology harm or help young people’s brains? A highly nuanced debate. The inexorable rise of work markets. The role and prominence of online markets for work have soared dramatically over the last few years, but this is just the beginning. I have been following the rise of online markets for work since Elance was founded in 1999, writing about them in my 2002 book Living Networks and dedicating a large chunk of Getting Results From Crowds to how to effectively manage work markets. Prominent VC Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has just written a post The Nature Of The Firm and Work Markets, referencing, as I did in both of these books, the seminal work of Ronald Coase. Wilson writes: Coase argues that transaction costs that make “trading bilaterally through contracts” expensive spur the organization of firms. And if those transaction costs could be eliminated, more individuals would choose to trade with each other rather than forming partnerships, companies, and other business entities.Enter the internet and having a computer in your pocket into this model and things change.
Explorer le futur en France et en français. Ceci est le premier billet de blog que j’écris en français. Je suis Australien, né à Canberra, mais mon père travaillais pour l’ONU et j’ai passé presque tout ma jeunesse à Genève. Je vivais ainsi à quelques kilomètres de la France et j’y allais tous les samedis pour skier. Cela fait bien longtemps que je n’ai pas vécu dans un pays francophone, mais heureusement je n’ai pas trop oublié mon français. Je vais passer de la fin avril à la fin mai en Europe, commençant avec un keynote à The Next Web à Amstersdam sur The Future of Crowds et enchaînant par la suite avec diverses conférences et ateliers, entre autres, à Londres, Luxembourg, Cologne, Moscou et Milan. Durant cette visite, mais aussi dans les années à venir, j’ai l’intention d’augmenter mon visibilité et de travailler beaucoup plus en France. Si vous avez des propositions ou des suggestions à me faire à propos d’opportunités en France, n’hesitez surtout pas à me contacter.
Le futur de Facebook et le rôle de la France. Value based pricing is at the heart of the future of professional services. Yammer and why activity streams are a key foundation for integrated applications and organizations. I caught up with some of the Yammer team this morning, including Chief Customer Officer David Obrand, while they are in town for the Yammer on Tour series. I was particularly interested in talking with them about Yammer’s shift to activity streams. In the massive convergence of enterprise social platforms that we’ve seen over the last years, one of the major emerging spaces is activity streams. Last year I wrote about activity streams in the context of Tibbr’s launch. Tibbr put activity streams squarely on the map, by integrating status messages from people with notifications generated by enterprise software including ERP, CRM, and HR systems. Yammer is now playing in the activity stream space, putting itself forward as a horizontal layer that ties together a wide variety of enterprise software systems.
While Yammer has long had open APIs, open graph protocol integration was only implemented 5 months ago. Themes of the day: Consumerization of IT, Crowdsourcing for small business, Crowdsourcing in PR. These are frantically busy days, which is squeezing my ability to blog and capture some of the fascinating stuff flying by. In coming months I think I’ll try to do more ‘mini-blogging’, just capturing quick thoughts and impressions rather than writing up every interesting speaking engagement or media appearance I do. Yesterday I gave three presentations, and I’d love to write (at least) a full blog post about what we covered for each one.
However that’s not possible, so I’ll just share quick thoughts about each topic and what I will try to write more about later. The day started by giving the keynote at a Consumerization of IT event run by CIO Magazine, supported by HP and Microsoft. As we shift to an economy of individuals, the primary locus of technology is moving from organizations to people. At lunch I presented on a webinar on Crowdsourcing: how your SME can benefit from the outsourcing boom, run by Business Spectator and supported by Amex. Open business: Sharing our group priorities for 2012 – Why not? A year ago I shared a visualization of our AHT Group Business Model. Following that, I am now sharing our group 2012 Priorities. This comes from the principle of Open Business you can see in the 7 Enablers for our strategy. Our intention is to share more about the drivers of our business. The 2012 priorities document was created for our own internal use to guide our activities and use of resources through this year.
Click on the image for full-size pdf Our AHT Group business model specifically describes the relationship between the (currently) three companies in the group and what I do. The 2012 priorities document covers all of the business activities across the group. As I get the chance I will write more about many of the specific projects and work covered in our 2012 priorities.
I will also start going into more detail into our business structures, which are described in the Enablers in the 2012 Priorities document. I believe open business will be central to the future of business. Finally I have an answer when people ask what I do! Visualization of our group’s business model. [UPDATE May 2013] The original business model below has now been updated and separated into two visuals: New AHT Group Business Model and AHT Group Strategic Overview For the last 15 years of my life post-employment I have struggled when people ask me what I do. More recently I have managed to crystallize a simple description of myself: Futurist and Entrepreneur. However that doesn’t explain the diversity of my companies’ activities, and how they fit together. In particular people are often confused by the relationship between our primary companies: Advanced Human Technologies, Future Exploration Network, and The Insight Exchange.
A few months ago I started designing a business model diagram to help me conceptualize the relationship between our brands and activities, our scalable and less scalable business models, and our current priorities. While it included a few personal aspirations, I ended up showing it a number of job applicants to help explain what we are doing. Revolution from the Edge. What fills you with wonder? What do you wonder about? These different, but related questions were posed often during the TED event last week. The annual TED event that I attended was organized around the broad theme of the rediscovery of wonder.
As always, TED catalyzed deep thinking and deep emotion as I navigated through awesome sessions and stimulating conversations lasting late into the night. Before too much time passes, I want to step back and reflect on what fills me with wonder. It was only peripherally addressed in the TED sessions, but like many catalysts it helped to coalesce and amplify some thoughts that have been coming together over the past couple of months. I am filled with wonder by many things, but in recent days I have been especially awed by the revolution that is taking shape before our very eyes. They seriously under-estimate what is going on. The convergence of edges How to describe this dimension of the Big Shift? It is an explosive convergence. Why the youth? Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design.
We live in a world defined by increasing time pressure and more and more things competing for our attention. In such a frenetic world, it is understandable that we place more value on the quality of our experience. We want to make the most of the time we have. Experience design has emerged in part as a response to this growing need we all have. It is no longer enough to design products and services so that they have aesthetic appeal and perform well. We demand a more satisfying broader experience when interacting with these products and services so that we more effectively pull out the true potential of these products and services. The next wave But this is just the beginning. What benefits would accrue to those who could offer such experiences? From diminishing returns to increasing returns What is the full potential here? What does this mean? What if there were an alternative?
Shifting from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows These constructal design theories have profound implications. Resolving the Trust Paradox. I love paradox, as anyone can tell from the name of the research center that I run with John Seely Brown in Silicon Valley – the Center for the Edge. Paradox is basically a puzzle, often juxtaposing two elements that at first seem like contradictions or at least defy explanation. Isn’t a center for the edge a contradiction in terms? How could that be? By engaging with a paradox and trying to sort through the apparent contradiction, one can often generate profound new insights that expand understanding. Framing the Trust Paradox A couple of weeks ago at a gathering in Paris sponsored by the Orange Institute, I explored a paradox that is central to the challenges and opportunities we face as individuals and institutions in the Big Shift. In a nutshell, here’s the paradox.
Yet, at the same time, trust in individuals and institutions is eroding. That’s the nub of the paradox: We all agree that trust is increasingly important but trust is rapidly eroding. But, how to resolve this paradox? The evolution of design to amplify flow. If we want to understand the importance of flows in our world, the new book Design in Nature released this week by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane is a must-read. It will literally change how you view the world – everything from snowflakes to volcanos.
As with most great books, this one is impossible to summarize in a brief blog, but I will try to offer enough of a glimpse to tease you into buying and reading the book. This book illustrates the power of living on the edge. Introducing the constructal law The core mission of this book is to introduce us to the constructal law: “For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.” The constructal law has a very broad reach: “The constructal law is revolutionary because it is a law of physics – and not just of biology, hydrology, geology, geophysics or engineering.
The authors caution The importance of design in flow systems. Pull Platforms for Performance. We live in a world of mounting performance pressure. Our Shift Index reveals that return on assets for all public companies in the US has eroded by 75% since 1965. Companies clearly are failing to respond effectively to these mounting pressures. If we hope to turn this around, we need to step back and take a systematic look at the performance levers that drive these results and question the approaches of the past. What drives company performance? It’s actually quite simple. Most businesses can be understood as bundle of three core operating processes, each driven by a unique performance lever.
Customer relationship management Customer relationship management is all about connecting with a set of customers, getting to know them deeply and delivering more and more value to them. [(Profit generated per year) x (years of relationship)] – cost of customer acquisition While simple to state, these variables are more and more challenging to manage. Product innovation and commercialization. Return on Attention and Infomediaries. Attention is getting a lot of attention. Most recently, Robert Scoble from Microsoft blogged about an epiphany he had earlier this week during a visit to Silicon Valley. He is beginning to see the importance of attention and how it will shape value creation on the Internet.
Attention is hugely important. It is the asset that will determine who creates value and who destroys value in the years ahead. Among other things, it will transform the nature and power of brands, as I discussed recently here, here and here. But I worry that we are confusing attention with attention profiles – the historical record of where we have allocated our attention in the past. Attention refers to the choice we each make regarding where we will focus at any point in time. Why is our attention so valuable? But it does pose a challenge. Attention profiles have the potential (but only the potential – there are serious challenges in harnessing this potential) to increase our return on attention. APML gains momentum – this could transform the personalization of advertising.
I’ve written before about attention profiling as one of the major trends in the online world. One of significant initiatives in the space is APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language), an open standard for how people’s attention profiles are described. Having this as a standard will, among other things, enable applications to refine how they provide information to users based on their interests, and allow people to publish their profiles so that they are better served by suppliers and information providers. Bloglines, the top or second placed feed reader, has just announced that it is looking at supporting APML in future releases, while Chris Saad, a founder of APML, says that they expect a number of other similar announcements from major players over coming months.
While Bloglines has not yet included APML support in the product, voicing its interest indicates this is very likely, and is no doubt intended to spur other companies to follow suit. Is the trend to openness accelerating? Social networks as an inflection point. The openness in social networks debate continues to flourish. Some of the more interesting and prominent commentary in the last couple of days, since my post on Openness, network effects, and competition in social networks, are: Scott Gilbertson (in Wired): Slap in the Facebook – It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up. Scott takes the pulpit, and calls on the web programming community to develop a framework based on open standards, and offering tips on how to create your own profile using open tools.
Dan Farber: Facebook, social capitalists and open networks. Dan thinks that revolution isn’t yet ripe, as users are still content to play within walled gardens. Anshu Sharma: Identity crisis in the land of social networks and platforms. Marc Canter. Pete Cashmore. Dare Obansanjo. In my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote: “Because the trend to open, accepted standards is clear, it is far better to go with it rather than fight it. The Digital Revolution and Higher Education. The Digital Revolution and Higher Education.
Mind the Gap: Peer-to-peer Healthcare. Smartphone Adoption and Usage. Social networking sites and our lives. Who consumes local information on the go? Do the parts of the information system fit together? One in four Americans live with a disability that interferes with activities of daily living. Trend Data (Adults) Trends to Watch - The Pew Center on the States.