Internet of Things

Even thought I wasn’t able to attend this years Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA (which looks pretty good right now with our wind-chill this morning adding up to a balmy -27 degrees Celcius!). This year since I wasn’t able to attend I got online and used the live stream and facebook integration to see the presenters and get a real sense from the chatter on the facebook widget, what people thought of the presentations. As usual my hunches were right! There were a few demos that stood out for their value propositions (that is their approach to solve a customer pain point), and some which were not so good. Sometimes its just the presenter which is awkward; sometimes the product/service is something that you’d question the need for;  often a combination of both. I always like this conference as the pace and structure is different from most that you attend. It goes like this: there are sometimes 80 presenters over the 2 day event and each presenter gets 6 minutes on stage in front of all of the conference attendees to explain their product/service and demonstrate how it works. Hence the name “Demo.” This year it seemed like the energy level was a bit low compared to my previous visits and I won’t ascribe that to the economy, but maybe to the fact that Demo creator Chris Shipley is passing on the reins after this conference to Matt Marshall, co-executive producer. Here is a quick rundown on the morning’s sessions- Pixetel- adds voice and video interactivity to emails, plays in any browser. Users can also send as secure links / email. You can verbally and visually explain spreadsheets, drawings, designs, proposals… anything on your screen. This was something that people online in the chat seemed to think was interesting and even though has been done in other applications, its good to see it brought to email Rallypoint – End-end Enterprise crisis management platform, but through the demo, didn’t really get a clear sense of the service until almost the end of the presentation. Vokle-  This company’s service is about adding live communications to the web. It adds an ability to discuss news/submissions live sort of like a video chat room. [Might be good for an enterprise?] Gwabbit- We’ve all been there: cutting and pasting each line of a signature in an email to put into your address book. This service scans emails and moves contact info to address book with a single click, but isn’t this more of a feature than a service? Shouldn’t Microsoft buy them? CC:Betty- In an interesting approach to bringing some more innovation to the email application (since Gmail who has really changed the paradigm?) This service brings content and items from email to web interface (They called it Facebook for email). I think this could be a great app from a network point of view. Citrix-“GoView” – This company wants to make screen recordings so simple your mother could use the service. (Why is everyone so disparaging of mothers?) Its still not that simple to use. My mom would have walked away long ago. Zuora-  There are lots of Facebook apps and lots of Developers and the “Z-commerce platform” allows them to monetize their apps. But I guess the question is, how many people would want to pay for the apps? Document Depository Corp –  This application is all about managing important documents like Corporate Governance and legal processes. Important for sure, but didn’t get a sense of excitement from the demo. Home accounts – If consumers had this service before the credit crisis, maybe we wouldn’t be in such a state now. It gives applicants a sense of the most appropriate (re: money saving)  mortgage for their situation. They are independent and not funded by the banks so can give (hopefully) less biased advice. Zipadi- A publishing platform to convert paper catalogue to ecommerce site. Hmm, hasn’t this been done before? 7billion people- (weblegend) person sales tactics; can change tactics in real time. Click stream based analysis of behaviour and site customization. Neat and they demo’d using the Amazon site even though Amazon is not their customer. [How’d they do that?] Liquid media-personalize advertising not sure how it works- is it voice mail only? So a full slate in the morning and I will try to get a handle on the afternoon sessions as well.

I just came across a fantastic interview with Stanford Professor and futurist Paul Saffo who talks about how we have moved from the Producer Economy (from about 1900 – 1950) to the Consumer Economy (fueled by Advertising and Marketing ) (from about 1950 till about 3 months ago (!)) and to the Creator economy, which we are entering right now. According to Saffo the Producer Economy was preoccupied by overcoming the scarcity of making stuff. It ended after the WW2 when firms realized they could make more stuff than people wanted.The next economy was dominated by the introduction of the credit card – and it was less about the workers who produced than the consumers who purchased the goods and services. Power shifted to those who created desire which pushed sales/ marketing (and especially advertising) to the forefront of the purchase process. Interestingly enough he highlights that in the Producer economy the promise was abundance but actually scarcity was the key motivator in the continuing goal of producing more goods and services. In the Consumer Economy, the mantra was buy more, then repeat. And we all know now that endgame. The fundamental difference he outlines in the creator economy is that the fundamental actor is the person who neither just produces nor consumes but does both in the same single act. People can create value without it costing anything and its all about interactivity. Google, YouTube, Wikipedia all exist as part of this new economy. He continues to detail the rise of the City State (not the Nation State which was prevalent up till now) and how mega regions will start to define how economic decisions are made in the future. As interests fragment keeping nations together with an incredibly diverse population will increasingly difficult. But people will self-select with others in creative geographies to provide the most opportunities for expression. He maintains that the essential theme for the next economy is uncertainty and he contends that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and we have to get used to it because that’s the way it is. I think he is largely right but additionally we have to somehow realize the flipside of uncertainty is opportunity because we can do so many things we have less constraints on our lives than ever. The implication is on the financial models that underpin this new economy. In the past, if you had invested in credit card companies at the beginning of the Consumer Economy you would have done well in hindsight. (Well up to about 6 months ago!) What is the model which underpins this new economy? Is it selling advertising against a whole bunch of creators work like Google? Or is it some other non-economic model like reputation or credibility? Only time will tell but Saffo’s advice? Always look back twice as far as you are looking forwards.

I was thinking recently about all the work being done around "natural language" search with several startups (notably powerset.com and textdigger.com) looking to make everyone's search experience less frustrating. Let's face it; despite all the work going into algorythms behind the scene, I don't think that search today is significantly different than 5 years ago. You type in your word combos into the box and hope and pray that something relevant comes back in the first 10 entries on the page. Or you can repeat with a slightly different boolean combo. And still hope and pray... But maybe its not simply in the initial search terms that determine how successful the search for information will be. Maybe if we acknowledge that its really really hard to get back the results we want on the first try, that the way to develop a better search experience is how you engage with the results to refine that search.  That's why I was interested in Quintura and more recently in silobreaker.com.  In each case they look at related items in a search visually in order to expose connections to the key search term. Don't think an item is related? Just get rid of it either by clicking the 'x' or in the case of silobreaker, dragging it to the trash.   It makes refining the search more intuitive but also exposes linkages between items by proximity and size. Which helps you understand what the internet google Quintura/Silobreaker thinks of you. Note: Another visual search engine was launched in Beta called SearchMe. Techcrunch covers it here

Jeff Bezos was one of the keynote speakers at the Web2.0 conference and in his eagerly anticipated talk he took the opportunity to highlight some of their initiatives to grow to the next level by providing outside businesses access to their world-class systems and technology. This approach would have seemed completely backwards about 5 years ago. Why provide potential competitors access to key technological assets and speed their time to market? Jeff tried to outline some of their thinking by kicking off his talk using their Amazon S3 internet-enabled file storage system; the same system they use internally for their e-commerce site Amazon.com. Amazon S3 has grown from about 800m objects stored in the system in July 2006 to over 5 Billion objects today. To illustrate some of the benefits of using the service, Bezos put the site Blueorigin (his effort to build a space vehicle) and all the video for the site on S3 so that they didn’t have to worry about scaling. This ended up being a prescient move as the traffic spiked when someone posted the site on Digg. In fact on that day in January after getting Dugg, the website and media objects on S3 responded to 3 million requests. There were countless downloads of the video leading to transfer of 758Gb of data in one day. They did this without a contract or any sales contact; it was all done self serve by filling out some forms on the site. And the best part of it was that for all of January it cost $304 dollars, with most of the charges coming for that one day! On S3s busiest day they were serving 1 billion requests per day and almost 16k requests/ second. Interestingly enough users include a company we may be familiar with; Microsoft. Secondlife and Powerset are also among the users. Another example of what Amazon is working on with their services involves a service called EC2 (EC2 stands for Elastic Cloud.) If for instance your business needed to process many media files from avi to mp4, you could use their EC2 service to process all these files, which traditionally has been a very processor intensive task. What would happen is that the raw media files stored in S3 pass messages to a queue service in EC2. EC2 finds a pointer in S3 to that avi file and starts the processing into an mp4. To maintain quality control when the queue grows long, the EC2 can spawn new EC2s to clone itself to increase throughput of the service. So in effect you have an on-demand virtual server environment, which you only have to pay for when used. After processing the objects the virtual servers are redeployed to other tasks so your business does not have to pay for all those processors 24/7. You can use what they call “pay-per-drink” pricing in order to only use what you need at that time. But a key question is how did Amazon get from a bookstore to an infrastructure provider? They took learnings from how to scale and deliver Amazon.com to other applications. Once they had this knowledge, they realized that they could then leverage this and open up this on a pay-per use basis so that companies didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they wanted to create an application or business. The question then comes to mind whether Amazon is ‘traditional’ Web2.0 business? They have grown up alongside other trailblazing Web 1.0 companies but in contrast to the newer Web2.0 companies, they also have many hard offline assets including huge warehouses. But even thought they have 10 million ft2 of fulfillment space they are trying to again leverage their processes and infrastructure to outside players to create an ecosystem. They reason that physical movement of goods won’t go away in next few years. So they will take the high cost services that businesses up to now have been forced to build or partner to get and allow businesses to exploit Amazon’s fulfillment network. You could think of this as the ‘programmable warehouse.’ You would simply hook into Amazon’s system and send a message that they should expect to receive items you will send over for storage in their warehouse. And the cost? Only 45 cents per cubic foot of storage per month. Then you can send a message to pick those things and Amazon would send them to an address you specify. So they look at the future of Web2.0 a bit differently; they don’t just look at what will be the big disruptors, but they also put dollars into what they think won’t change. Interestingly, they feel they can build a strategy around what won’t change rather than what might.