Tag Archive for 'enterprise'

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

Published
by
Elias Bizannes
on September 8, 2007
in Innovation
. 0 Comments

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

The attention economy needs a consistent base

Published
by
Elias Bizannes
on June 10, 2007
in Attention economy
. 1 Comment

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 bureauÂ? 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 andÂ? 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

Published
by
Elias Bizannes
on May 28, 2007
in wizardsofoz
. 1 Comment

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.

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