This is a prezi from a lecture I gave earlier this week on the shift from content-based to attention-based economy, and the way network power laws (the long tail) inform business practices online.
Sep 092011
Apr 082011
I recently discovered this white paper by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle – two of the major gurus of web 2.0 and search respectively. Plenty of interesting information and ideas to chew on, but what really caught my attention is their discussion of the notions of information shadows and deep context learning by database algorithms. It is fairly banal to observe that each of us consists of multiple identity-layers, but how do you teach a database to make the meta-connections between these disparate pieces of data? And what happens when you teach it that? I need to think more about this but it seems an argument could be made that at a certain meta-level the subject-object divide becomes inconsequential; in other words, the difference between a human and an object is a function of their ‘entanglement networks’.
This awesome infographic (courtesy of Mahendra Palsule from Techmeme and Skeptic Geek) - illustrates perfectly how a business based on exploiting the long tail in its field will always beat older (and more established) business practices. A mere 11 years ago Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for peanuts, but instead it completely ignored what Netflix and its ilk portend, probably believing (commonsense) that a brand name and a global distribution chain are an unassailable bastion. A defining mistake. What Netflix did to Blockbuster, Amazon did to Borders and a myriad of smaller booksellers. The cloud is winning.
The current cloud computing landscape, divided into private/enterprise providers, public platforms, and the hybrid cloud – the infographic illustrates revenue, employees, and market capitalization. The result is a very interesting comparison – i.e. FB vs Amazon vs Twitter.
I just discovered Jolicloud – an open source, Ubuntu Linux based operating system made for the cloud. Apparently the original version – 1.0 – was made entirely with netbooks in mind, though the latest version I am downloading now – 1.1 – is hardware neutral and should run on anything. I am planning to run it in dualboot with Windows on my Hp Mini as a start and see how it goes from there. The access screen looks beautiful, with intuitive functionality and zero hints of the Linux beast under the hood running the OS. Start screen>
Update: I am writing this through Jolicloud on my netbook – the install is fast, smooth, and probably as painless as it can get. First screen asks to connect online, which is what one should expect from a cloud OS. The layout feels a bit like a cross between Ubuntu and Android, which makes sense to me. With cloud connectivity it should all be about speed and smooth experience, so I decided to test that by streaming music and doing a couple of other things simultaneously. So, while I am typing this I am listening to Henry Saiz streaming through the SoundCloud player app, while also running Prezi in another window for good measure, and the overall speed and experience make me a believer. I haven’t tested things like connecting to projectors or corporate wifi, but from what I see so far Jolicloud is a win.
Feb 232011
This little graph from IHS Reseach has been making a lot of noise around the interwebs in the last three days. The message is that app store revenue is growing all over the board, in some cases quite dramatically, which is ultimately just another proof that the trend away from the desktop and towards the cloud is real and getting stronger. Android Market revenue grew 861.5% year-over-year – read that figure again. Of course the Android revenue is still puny compared to what Apple is making on its apps, but the other important figure is that the Apple App Store lost 10% of market share over the same period. With the three-way competition between Samsung, HTC and Motorolla for control over the Android hardware market only heating up, these figures can go only one way for Apple.
To make things even gloomier for Apple, Eric Schmidt just announced at MWC2011 that Android has 300 000 activations per day and rising, that YouTube apparently gets 160 million mobile views per year, and that ChromeOS is definitely coming this year. I will probably have another post with more on that speech.
Feb 212011
The Internet of Things is slowly but surely becoming an unevenly distributed reality. Early precursors – a number of sites dedicated to creating accessible crowdsourced data-clouds for everyday objects. After being created, each data-cloud is accessible through scanning a printable tag which can be downloaded from the site. The information I upload into the cloud together with the image/video can be as trivial as ‘this is my writing desk’, or as arcane as the travails of family heirloom. It doesn’t matter – most of the data will be useless, but the potential of object socialization is immense because of a/ the ability to create semantic depth where until now there was none, b/enfolding the rich dynamics of space and time in objects, c/ merging physical reality with the net.
Object stories: Tales of Things, Itizen, StickyBits
Architecture intermediaries: Pachube, Mbed
While object stories are the easiest path of entry and therefore probably where the majority of participation will occur for now, a project like Mbed has massive potential as it ultimately may do the for the internet of things what blogspot and the likes did for self-expression.
An excellent graph from a Pew Internet Research study (courtesy of Flowtown), illustrating the rising importance of mobile apps. My guess is that the percentage of paid apps downloads will only increase until this becomes the main revenue stream of cloud platforms.
All things considered, this Julian Bleecker’s Why Things Matter is probably the closest we have to a Manifesto for the internet of things. Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things is also in that category, but it’s a longer text and it lacks the theoretical punch. Besides, any theoretical piece on networked objects has to first deal with the modern separation of the world into the nature/culture dichotomy, and Bleecker does just that with his use of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern.
As I discussed in my last post on cloud computing, Google’s strategic decision to release Android as an open source platform, therefore granting complete hardware freedom to vendors and complete app freedom to geeks, has resulted in something resembling a blitzkrieg on Apple’s Maginot line around the iPhone. Apple’s iThings are still shiny, and they might still release another household appliance masquerading as a computing/communication device, but it seems the droid army has made them irrelevant. Consider:
Google’s Android leapfrogging over iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows – Mercury News on the latest Android sales figures, provided by Gartner market research. Why is this important? In the context of cloud computing the key battle to be waged (correction, the battle is already raging in earnest) is about the platform from which users will access the cloud. At the most basic spec level this platform will have to be mobile, always-on, and malleable enough to allow a near-unlimited number of services running through it. It is this last bit which makes the Android a key development – the platform is open for a theoretically unlimited number of apps and Google has relinquished control over certification. Crucially, the most important actor-network in the app business – the developers – seem to agree:
“The developers tell us they love Android. It’s easier to learn; it takes less time, and one of the complaints we hear quite a bit about is (Apple’s) app certification process as a real thing that costs them time and money”
The key bit not mentioned in the article is that the iPhone had a two-year head-start on Android, and an army of carefully cultivated cultist followers ready to buy anything the company deigns to release. This makes the following graph all the more amazing:
Smartphone market share (courtesy of Mercury News)
India’s $35 Android 7-inch Tablet to Hit in January – Tom’s Hardware, Engadget on the upcoming release of a dirt-cheap Android-based cloud-tablet-for-the-masses in India. The price tag suggests this is a a heavily-subsidized device (unless they have achieved some mind-boggling economics of scale), which in turn suggests this may be part of a long-term strategy by the Indian government to leapfrog their infrastructure deficiencies. As I’ve already mentioned, governments have two possible ways to deal with those – either invest heavily in the established technology (for example fiber networks), or forget about the established tech and concentrate on the upcoming one. Australia seems hell-bent on going the former way, while India seems to be going with the latter. From the perspective of cloud platforms, this of course is a major win for the Android. An entire generation will be growing up using open source as their main net platform.
The future of the internet. A virtual counter-revolution – The Economist on the developing ‘secret garden’ trend online, and the many possible repercussions for the internet as we know it. The article is long, detailed, and covers everything from censorship and the Great Firewall of China to the Apple app store and net neutrality. Why is this important? Crucially, the article suggests that fragmentation is inevitable, and not necessarily a bad thing. When most people spend the majority of their time online on Facebook, and are there entirely of their own volition, it is a bit rich to bemoan the evil corporate takeover of the net. In this context the key issue seems to be not net neutrality but platform openness. The cloud is all about always/everywhere-on access, and while different protocols might still be treated differently depending on the carrier, the connectivity will be there. Given the already-happening fragmentation of common content into fiefdoms (Facebook, Apple app store), the strategic question concerns levels of access and open vs closed platforms in the cloud. In other words, Android vs iPhone.
The web’s new walls. How the threats to the internet’s openness can be averted – An article from The Economist related to the one above but discussing in more detail the issue of net neutrality. Why is this important? Probably one of the key fronts in the battle for cloud dominance will be about access levels and the related price structures. The heated debate around net neutrality is quite superficially based on concerns about content discrimination (access providers censoring content through pricing), while the underlying issue is of course about competing access levels. In other words, about open markets and competition. The article rightly points out that the whole net neutrality debate is actually a distraction based on a misunderstanding of how markets operate (I am sorry to say this is arcane knowledge for most academics). The best example comes from the Apple app store – what good is net neutrality when the user is locked in a walled garden filled only with content blessed by the high priest himself? The last three paragraphs of the article provide a nice summation of the overall argument.
Mining social networks: Untangling the social web – The Economist on the exponentially growing business of network analysis, covering everything from counter-terrorism to social networks and foreign aid. Why is this important? This article illustrates what seems to be the dominant, if not the only, business model on the cloud – filtering data and managing layers of meta-data. As I argued in a recent lecture on engaging authorless content, when data is free organizing it becomes valuable. Considering that the cloud is comprised only of data, the only relevant measure of value is the layers of meta-data that can be extracted from the primary set. In other words, network analysis is going to be a very big business.
Cloud