Supernova 2006: because technology is everyone's business

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Thanks for Another Amazing Supernova!

Well, Supernova 2006 is over. (Posts here may continue, though, as our bloggers reflect on the conference.)

What a three days!  I just want to thank all the people who helped make Supernova 2006 a success, including our attendees, speakers, sponsors, partners, moderators, staff, volunteers, bloggers, videobloggers, podcasters, and others.  Unlike most major technology conferences, there is no big company behind Supernova.  The Wharton School and our sponsors provide invaluable support, but I organize Supernova myself, with a small support team of outstanding people.  Everyone on that team knocked themselves out during the conference.  We tried to create the best possible experience for all Supernova participants.  I hope you took away something valuable from the event. 

In the end, I’m not in the business of conference management; I’m in the business of connecting great people, great organizations, and great ideas.  That’s what happened at Supernova 2006… and that’s what I’m looking forward to doing again next year. 

I value your .

Friday, June 23, 2006

Future of the Desktop

Over lunch, panelists talked about how the metaphors of the desktop will change as the things people do online change. Here’s some of what they said:

Tom Ngo, NextPage
Lili Cheng, Microsoft
Gary Bennitt, Goowy
Chris Thomas, Intel
Kevin Lynch, Adobe

Q: What is the one thing that needs to change about the operating system or desktop metaphor.

NextPage: We come at the topic from the perspective of a company selling enterprise software. As you reel out control to end users, you see an explosion of productivity. In the enterprise, the infrastructure is not set up for the distributed world we live in.

Microsoft: Working on social computing – sharing and synching information – you discover new things that make the experience come alive. The OS needs to support sharing and synching, so you can do a better job of managing your life.

Goowy: With data being available everywhere, you’ll see an evolution in the way devices access the same data in different places.

Intel: The next generation of solutions are going to be assembled from multiple components, devices and vendors. The OS platform needs to know what the interface is, what type of connection you have, where you are.

Adobe: It will be critical to make the new applications work in ways that are similar to the existing, familiar applications.

Q: Are we getting more decentralized, or will data aggregate?

NextPage: More things are happening locally, with the end user. End users need control of their data.

Adobe: The trend swings back and forth between centralization and decentralization.

Intel: With the advent of a service-oriented architecture, there is a fundamental change.

Microsoft: Do users what to aggregate all of their information? For privacy reasons, they may want to segment, based on the level of integration they want among work, home and hobbies.

Q: Do we limit ourselves by the words we use – user, application, data?

Adobe: When we work on content, applications and communications with customers, they come together in ways we don’t know how to talk about. Web 2.0, mashups, tagging, wikis, microformats are new words to describe the innovations that are happening. We apply tech to solve problems. Those are applications.

Intel: Language can be so abstract as to be meaningless, e.g., solution.

Q: What is the role of the desktop when data is centralized? And what happens to privacy?

Intel: There are things we’re doing on the desktop to help separate data, shield data, and still work in the environment.

Goowy: If you can be assured that your data would be secure and private, you could store it in a central place like goowy.
Microsoft: You want to store your email on servers, for example, so you don’t have to manage it all yourself on your desktop.

NextPage: I physically partition data on my PC to keep confidential information separate and secure.

Q: How do you archive decentralized data, and how much of it needs to be archived?

Intel: You do want to figure out how to archive, and what the legal implications are with the archive service provider.

Microsoft: What you archive depends on what you will you care about in the future (e.g., irreplaceable data, like family photos).

Q: What happens to privacy rights as data moves between platforms, domains, devices, carriers?

Goowy: Data that is private can’t be shared without your permission. If you post a photo and someone else mixes it and redistributes it, you gave up your right to privacy when you shared it.

Intel: You can attach terms of use to data when you share it. For example, layer in copyright and distribution instructions in tag.

Microsoft: We may need new tools to protect privacy rights, as we see the way people use the shared data.

Adobe: It’s freedom vs. security. If you want the freedom to share, you give up some security.

Q: Are we creating new kinds of data banks? Places we feel comfortable storing and moving it around.

Adobe: Banks are too closed of a metaphor for the dynamic of sharing data. This is building walls, windows, doors, keys, locks, who can come in, etc.

NextPage: You can’t copy money. With information, your employer can read your email and anything on your laptop. You can copy data and send out multiple copies.

Q: Is there a conflict of goals between sharing information via the social networking services vs. being anonymous online. If the desktop is your home, and it can be invaded by social software, how can you protect your identity?

Microsoft: Identify will be key in decentralization. People don’t want just one identity for all their interactions. If you centralize, and log in with one identity, you have to put your trust in that one service. In the decentralized world, we have to build trust.

Goowy: If you want your data to stay private, you can trust one institution to store and protect it (like a bank).

Intel: We have to create clear boundaries with the services we subscribe to . There are laws in the physical world for the protection of our rights.

Who Owns You?

We ask: What information do you get about people, and whose information is it? Here’s what these panelists say (text is not verbatim):

Seth Goldstein, Root Markets
Kyle Birkman,
John McCrea, Plaxo

Root Markets: We enable buyers and sellers in the mortgage space to exchange consumer data. We provide price discovery for lead generation. Brokers who traffic in this data see wide margins because they maintain a black box between buyers and sellers. We provide more transparency. Attention Trust is a non-profit organization for consumers to advocate for ownership of their own metadata. They have property right to a copy of it, it should be mobile between services, you should be able to participate in an economy with your data, and you shouuld have transparency to see how it’s being used. Sometimes what you don’t pay attention to is as important as what you do pay attention to. We enable people to capture their click stream data.

MySpace: It’s a user generated content site, mostly for teenagers, where they exchange photos, post comments, send messages and other data. It’s not an ecommerce site. But it gets very personal about people. We view the data as belonging to the user. The technology that supports that data, the social network that links your profile to others, creates value for the user. A user can cancel and delete their account. And we can cancel and delete accounts, if they violate our terms. We have to provide a safe and welcoming environment without a heavy hand.

Plaxo: Plaxo is a smart address book service that enables people to have richly populated address book with the assurance that that address book will be available anywhere and will never be lost or stolen. The same address book can be used in Microsoft Outlook at work, at home on your Mac or PC, through a secure web site, or through your mobile phone. We store your contact info, and the info about your contacts. With info about 10 million users, we need a high bar on privacy policy. We are the custodian of their personal information. The information belongs to the user. We store it and enable you to share it.

Q: Plaxo has drawn fire for emailing everyone in your book for an update and asking them to join Plaxo.

Plaxo: The controversial feature of the update contacts request email, that was not a well executed strategy. We’ve taken steps to publicly apologize, as well as change the feature set so we don’t send out emails to update someone else’s address book.

Root Markets: The enterprise value created by Plaxo is carried by the people who do the updating. There will be a big challenge to rebuild trust. All of these services own bits and pieces of people, but people may choose one service to promote themselves. Their trust will go to the provider who provides the most value.

MySpace: If we ask people to create a discreet address book at every service, that is a waste of their time. We should let them use contact lists created elsewhere.

Q: If you want to join another social networking site, the interfaces are closed and don’t work together, so you can’t bring your identity with you.

MySpace: If you have a large network that you spent a long time creating, you don’t want to give that value away to your competitors. Some users join the service because it’s portable. But that’s not the standard value proposition.

Q: Is it realistic to think people will voluntarily give up information that will be used to market to them?

Root Market: People with bad credit and need cash will give up a lot of information about themselves. What drives lead generation is sub-prime credit. A California refinance candidate with fair to good credit and wants to refinance is worth $150, and that customer gets sold four times. They’re contacted by four qualified lenders. As people express more data, the lead generation space will figure out how to monetize that by selling their data to advertisers.

Q: The lead generation market sounds kind of scary. Will MySpace users with X fields filled out in their profile be worth a certain amount of money?

Root Market: The data is there, the question is whether we’ll surface those prices— how much would they sell it for? Once you go online and start to search and click, you become worth more to certain types of advertisers. We’re finding out what the price is.

Q: Does identity and reputation management become a function of the service?

MySpace: We’re not planning to become a database of buying intentions.

Plaxo: We take a narrow view of what we want to do. We don’t’ do advertising. We plan to add services on top of the address book.

Q: There’s explicit information you contribute, implicit information you contribute (e.g., your click stream tail), then there’s a third category of data that’s about you, but it doesn’t come from you. What are the boundaries around that third category?

Root Market: If whose blog you’re reading is being tracked by others who want to read the blogs you read, then your online reputation is affected by that. Where your attention is on the internet is of interest to others.

MySpace: Knowing who views your profile is a privacy issue on both sides. In a physical community, there are lots of things we don’t know about people.

Plaxo: Whether it’s MySpace or FaceBook, it’s how people react to the service and how comfortable they are sharing information. It’s shocking to see how much people reveal sometimes.

Q: One model in Germany is to put in your business information, open your network, and see who looked at your profile based on what keyword they typed in. It opens a world of transparency. But it’s the opposite of the anonymous Internet presence.

Plaxo: Like LinkedIn, it’s an experiment in social networking. It’s interesting to see how it is adopted in other cultures.

Q: In the RFID tech area, privacy concerns arise because people don’t understand what data is being tracked. How do we participate in the public forum about privacy?

Plaxo: With consumer facing Web services, most users don’t read the terms of agreement. We continue to struggle to get better transparency screen by screen on our services.

MySpace: You try not to surprise people with things they wouldn’t expect to get from the info they provided.

Root Market: What Attention Trust did with click stream was empower people to see their data and understand where it goes.

Q: There are two clashing currents: Teenagers are desperate to put all their personal information online vs. privacy concerns of parents about information like addresses and phone numbers making them vulnerable.

MySpace: We need to do a better job of educating people about what is reasonable behavior online.

The Next Five Billion Users

What happens when connectivity ramps up in the developing world? Here’s what these panelists had to say:

Dan Shine, AMD
Rajesh Jain, Netcore
Lyn Jeffery, Institute for the Future

AMD: 50x15.com is a rolling odometer for internet adoption. We’re not going to reach 50% of the world until 2030. That’s not acceptable. There is no one solution. AMD is partnering with others to bring technology to the people who need it.

Netcore: In Bombay India, there are 40 million internet users. The government target is to get 10 million broadband users by 2008. The monthly spend is about $5/month for 256K connectivity. Looking ahead to what is required in India, broadband isn’t being deployed fast enough by the government owned telcos. Most of the investment is going into mobile. To get to the mass market, the mobile phones can be deployed with GPRS. Also, if we can network computers with thin clients in education and mid-sized businesses, they can make a small payment for connectivity. Netcore is working on building out a mobile internet. We need to have a $100 price point for the device and a $5 to $10 price point for services. We need to make the access device as simple and manageable as possible.

IFTF: Studying the Chinese internet from a cultural point of view, we can think of the Chinese internet as an alternate Internet (from the English language/American Internet). The state owned media are much slower at info gathering and content delivery. There is more emphasis on mobile devices than PCs. Youth usage is different, while they’re preoccupied studying to get into college. In China there are more than 100 million internet users, with 64 million on broadband. You see the Chinese internet showing up on Technorati, with a Chinese blog ranking No. 1. Sina.com is the biggest portal. Baidu is the leading search engine. One service lets users create play lists and search for MP3 files, a main driver of use. People can become popular on the Internet quite quickly, like the Backdorm Boys video.

Q: Are we seeing the emergence of a global internet culture, or will the internet replicate cultural differences?

IFTF: A lot of the ads and content only make sense if you are Chinese. The genre may be a global phenomenon, but the content is cultural.

AMD: You see the adoption of the best of what’s global. Some of the most impactful content is generated locally. In S. Africa, they’re delivering online education using local artists to play the roles in Shakespeare, for example. It helps bridge the gap, when they put the content in the context of the people who are consuming it.

Netcore: Advertising on the internet is very small. But searching for jobs is the largest, most profitable Indian portal. In the mobile segment, phone customization, wall paper and ring tones are popular. Part of the Internet use is global, in that they use Google. But there are parts that are India focused.

AMD: While tech develops and costs lower, the definition of access varies. Do you consume content in the way it was intended to be consumed? If you access the internet through your mobile phone, you don’t get the rich content tableau that creates the immersive experience.

IFTF: China has released it’s own set of domain names, which for practical purposes creates a separate internet, rendering those domains in Chinese characters. That has huge implications for how we do business and sell products there. If the Chinese internet indexes different data and shaping a differing world view, that has implications for geopolitics and understanding.

Q: FCC policies were developed with a view to the rest of the world, thinking if the US were ahead, it would push other countries to adopt. What does it take to catalyze a bottom up force?

AMD: We’ve learned that you have to create a sustainable ecosystem, working with people locally on the hardware, logistics, and people who can service the solutions. When you complete a deployment, there has to be a long term plan for local sustainability. Microfinance is one aspect, enabling people to acquire equipment at lower costs or pay as you go.

Netcore: To catalyze growth in India, alternate communication tech like wireless broadband could make a huge difference. Also, providing technology to improve education and literacy.

IFTF: When China moves to mobile connectivity, that will open the internet to the mobile phone users who are a largely different group now.

Q: How is high-speed broadband deployed in China?

IFTF: There is an unusually high number of broadband users, partly because its affordable. Many users get primary access at internet cafes. But the trend is shifting toward internet in the home.

AMD: The persistency of the connection is variable. As connections slow to 8K, they can’t be downloading video or using VoIP.

Netcore: In India, we call it always on narrow band.

Q: How can the outside world have an impact?

AMD: One way is through financing, making microfinancing available. Also, addressing tariff issues that make the devices unaffordable.

Netcore: Two barriers that need to be addressed in India are in telcom industry and in the mobile space.

Q: What makes these places markets of opportunity, and what are the barriers?

IFTF: Recognizing that the internet in china is different, and that will affect marketing. Translation is a huge issue. We need humans in addition to machine translation.

Netcore: Countries like India and China offer huge untapped markets that can be profitable at very low price points. They offer voice at 1 cent a minute. Network management is outsourced. Look at the markets as being in early stages of growth. Spend a few weeks there to understand the opportunities, local business models, and how local culture influences those models.

Cutting the Cords: The Wireless Explosion

Moderator Om Malik, Business 2.0 explores the future of wireless and wireless broadband with these panelists:

Clint McClellan, Qualcomm
Selina Lo, Ruckus Wireless
Pierre De Vries, USC Annenberg Center
Juergen Urbanski, Fon

Here are the highlights of this sometimes lively debate:

Q: Where do you see the wireless ecosystem evolving in the next five years?

Ruckus: We believe in wifi, which has surpassed Ethernet as the most popular LAN networking tech for the home. The problem with wifi is, it can’t reach far, there are coverage problems and unpredictable performance. We have a wide installed base of carriers who distribute IPTV from the home gateway and the set top box. They want to watch TV anywhere. Today, houses are not wired for the TV where ever you want it. Getting TV on screens and mobile devices, watching DVT recordings on the train is on the horizon.

Q: With high def TV and large files, what is the minim bandwidth in the home?

USC: There is a transition to digital TV in the US, which will free up spectrum for in home, between home and metro area. Above 700 mega hertz will be auctioned off. Below that, there will be TV stations. In each city there are effectively 15-30 vacant channels. The FCC says you can operate broadband wireless in these channels without interfering with TV. The most efficient way to allocate these would be to have them unlicensed. There will be different business models for the licensed and unlicensed channels. You’ll get wifi plus, and wireless ISPs will be able to create networks more easily. The mesh application will enable neighborhood meshes to get inside homes.

Q: Why should we pay attention to Fon, and what are you doing in this ecosystem?

Fon: Anywhere in a city, there are up to 25 hotspots in range. If you see the list, they’re mostly secure/private, or they’re commercial and you pay for access. The price points are geared toward business customers. Coverage is universal in metro areas, but basic access is not. If we all trusted each other, you could invite people in the vicinity of your home to use your bandwidth, which isn’t at capacity. We provide a Linux based authentication system that lets people roam for free among their peer networks, or at an affordable fee. We change the economics. We don’t require special equipment. People download the software on their router or buy one from us. It let’s us share the excess bandwidth, bringing it into reach of the consumer.

Q: If you read your terms of service with your carrier, you’re not allowed to resell bandwidth. Whey should they run the risk of using Fon?

Fon: The large ISPs have terms that say you can’t share bandwidth. We’re talking with the large ISPs in the US. There is a value prop for them, because they’ll get a share of the revenue that we take. If you look at the economics, you access the internet several days a month, it’s cheaper to become a broadband subscriber than to pay for access at the commercial access points. Muni wifi and Fon are complementary. Mini wifis are highly political processes with RFPs and long lead before deployment. Fon is grassroots, already here. The overlapping and conflicting objectives of cities can’t be met by one provider. Muni wifi is from the street in. Fon is from the home out.

Q: Do you see a battle with open wireless?

Qualcomm: There’s a place for all of the technologies. There is value in buying spectrum, because you can get greater coverage. Unlicensed spectrum that’s free is highly competitive. Anyone can get in there and start a business. Mobile phone subscribers are paying for future build out of the 3g network. Between 3g tech and wifi, it’s hard to see where anything else fits. If you have embedded 3g and wifi, what are the other choices? As the functionality and capabilities increase, and mobile phones become 3g enabled, you can use your phone as your internet connection.

Q: If you have carriers that restrict use of their networks to subscribers, is that enough incentive for free spectrum carriers to emerge?

Qualcomm: If one company gets into it, others will follow. The incumbents have coverage as a primary asset. Today, wherever you go, there is good coverage. You can change a business model to chase rate plans and user plans, but not to build out coverage where it doesn’t yet exist.

Q: If you have Comcast at home, then another carrier on the road, it’s frustrating for the user.

Ruckus: If you can have a wireless skype phone, and there is wireless access at all of the hotspots, you can get cheap long distance. With licensed spectrum and prices coming down, bundled services still won’t satisfy customers. Long distance is expensive.

Qualcomm: You may save money on calls, but you want to make a call where ever you are. And you’ll want to have data where ever you go. You don’t want to look for hotspots.

USC: The distinction is edge in or center out. Unlicensed networks let you innovate to deploy. Quite a few of the Connected Innovators were making widgets you can get help navigate the different networks.

Ruckus: Whether you have free, bundled or by the minute service, users shouldn’t have to worry about switching carriers.

Fon: The future we see is where wifi access is ubiquitous and accessible. The medium term future, we’ll have a variety of network connected devices shifting between carriers. The question is what applications you can layer on to create new value.

Q: One group not represented on the panel is the end user. There is user pain to adopt the tech – connecting to, using and switching between networks. Who will think about the end user?

Ruckus: Users get frustrated about reliability. You get used to having mobile phone conversations cut off, but if you’re watching a World Cup game, you wouldn’t tolerate losing service. Wifi is great for data and voice, things that aren’t mission critical. It has a way to go before it robust enough to support mission critical services.

USC: The internet is driven by protocols. One way to solve the problem is Real Simple Networking protocol that offers a choice. The networks that could make this available would need to work together. There’s an opportunity for revenue sharing. But the carriers don’t want to be a dumb pipe. They want to offer services. If a device offers a quality of service that users value, users would pay for RSN.

Q: Users want to be able to roam without paying 60 cents minute. How do you get a happy customer who is happy to pay?

Qualcomm: The carrier business model is to charge roaming charges. We try to add applications that give you extra services, such as song downloads or TV downloads.

USC: Competition within a given regulatory regime and between those regimes will create an ecosystem where we can test different assumptions. Diversity will solve the problem, but it will take time.

Q: What Web 2.0 applications will drive users to use the wireless connectivity?

Ruckus: One of our customers is a carrier that offers services that distinguishes them from pipe providers. They offer IPTV over DSL network. Now, they’re moving on to allowing people to watch IPTV from a hotspot using a laptop or handheld devices, and offering services that lets subscribers place wifi cams in areas of the home they want to monitor. These require reliable wifi access. They provide the devices that enable these services, and they’re monetizing the services.

Fon: From VoIP to IPTV, to more community based approaches where you can tell if your buddies are in your proximity, to gaming where they can become mobile.

USC: If you step back and look at the phases of communication: from the cloud to the user, then user to user, to devices communicating with each other. That will be come a source of applications.

Qualcomm: Your phone knows where you are and who you are. Soon it will have wifi and Bluetooth. We can then build push services, like alerts about events or presence or coupons.

Spotlight Talk: Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!

Some thoughts on innovation from Bradley Horowitz, head of the Technology Development Group of & Marketplace (text is not verbatim):

Yahoo! Search vision is FUSE: Find, Use, Share and Expand. It’s different from the competition, because people are part of our vision. It’s better search through people.

There’s a natural order breakdown of the online community. You have active creators, the small percentage that will start a Yahoo! Group. There are people who will proactively participate in that group. Then there is the 90% of people who will always lurk.

When you think about community based products, this pyramid preserves the integrity of content through natural gate keeping. The people who have the privilege of making Hollywood movies have reputation, budget, etc. that enables them to do what they do.

At Yahoo we’re breaking down the barriers between people who create, people who remix, and people who download.

If you look at what’s available on Flickr, you can see a list of the most interesting photos on the site. You can create an algorithm that finds the most popular images and looks at the relationships between he people who made them popular, and the result is a truly outstanding selection of images with emotional resonance.

Yahoo search has evolved from human editorial through mass automation to topological analysis (thanks to Google). But there are other authorities of trust to consider. Social search uses the past advances, refactoring in human participation. We invite the world to participate in My Web, Yahoo Answers and other services.

At Yahoo research, we’re the “roadies”: We build the stage, work the soundboard, etc. One project is “Hack Yahoo!” We have to hack the protocols and procedures to release pent-up creativity. We have a speaker series, weekly hack lunches, and hack day – mash up or shut up.

We take the spirit of hack and, through the Yahoo Developer Network, we expose what we’ve created in the last decade. We know we don’t have all the good ideas and innovation. We want people to create viable businesses on our platform. It’s creating an ecosystem.

Innovation takes the courage to be wrong and make mistakes.

Who's information is that?

Seth - Root Markets
John McCrea - Plaxo
Kyle Brinkman - MySpace
Who owns that - the information that is constructed about you. Reputation that has come from what other people say about you.

Who’s information is that? and what are the limits on what you can do with it?

Seth -
Attention Trust - principles
1) Property Right to copy
2) Mobile - movable
3) Participate in an economy
4) Maintain transparency

Lots of people don’t realize the value of the information you create when you don’t know you are creating attention

Kyle - The structure that creates that data - I supervise the social network - liking to different peoples profile. 

John - address available everywhere

Q: Is it going to change?
If you build a large network - you are being asked the doors to smaller or larger competitors and essentially give away some of that value...where does the exchange take place.  Some users join because they can take it away. Demand must rise so that we just must have to do it. 

IM is not interoperable.

There was a very interesting back channel conversation about identity as this panel happened....

There was a conversation about Plaxo and whether one could trust them. People pointed to their privacy policies:

* Control over your information,
* Freedom from unwanted communications, and
* Trust that your information will not be shared or sold.

Others talked about Plaxo spam and how they didn’t like it.

People asked about whether the development of identity systems will create a demand by vendors - and governments - that you identify yourself or your not allowed to play.  I highlighed that in the idnetity community there is strong awarness that anonymity is a right that must be maintained.

One guy kept saying we need sxip...I highlighed the emerging open standard - OpenID 2.0 and the great annoucements this week in that space. logins soon (at minute 52 he mentions it).

The Secret to Happiness

At the end of Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, talk he posts this Glasbergen.com cartoon of a hiker that reaches the summit of mountain (could be Nepal) facing the archetypal wise mountain sage parked there with the long beard. Interestingly enough, the sage has a laptop (the view might beat my garden’s where I like to haul my own laptop). The caption reads: “The secret to happiness is: Always get as much RAM as you can possibly afford.”

Funny that it concludes with happiness and technology, it’s what I wrote about on my blog today.  In there I write:

It’s not exactly that I’m a Luddite. I have a BSEE and been a CTO. Yet I totally understood the woman (and there’s not that many women here) who snuck out of the dark conference room on a beautiful yesterday in downtown San Francisco to stroll into an art gallery.

I also wrote: “I want my technology to enrich my life, not complexify it nor drag me away from life. And if not, I simply cannot get excited about gadgetry and bytes anymore.” I’ve more common ground with ‘regular’ people (those that think Java is a drink, Ruby a gem) than much of the audience at Supernova so you can expect an ‘outsider’ view (not necessarily contrarian, not necessarily echo chamber either) of the Supernova topics in my musings even though my background makes me an ‘insider’. (So that means that cramming more RAM for its own sake - for what purpose? - is not mydefinition of happiness.)

I’m also more of a big-picture synthesist writer, so you can expect no more posts today. I typically need about a day of distance to allow the patterns and perspective among the themes to weave into something greater than individual sessions live-blogged. So the digestion and incubation begins in a few hours, emerging in posts this weekend.

Enjoy the rest of the afternoon sessions! Enjoy your weekend! 

Perspective: Werner Vogels, Amazon

Werner Vogels, , shows us the Amazon enterprise. Here are the highlights:

Look at the NBA Store. This is running on the Amazon.com platform. When you go through checkout, you can use your Amazon ID. Not every story that runs on the Amazon uses the Amazon ID. There is a lot of mishing and mashing going on.

If you need to build a new application, you want to drive traffic there, you need to make sure it always stays up, and it needs to survive a complete data center outage without any impact to the customer.

Whether you’re building Web 2.0 or traditional website, you first need to build a robust infrastructure. No piece of the infrastructure is unbreakable. You need to be able to deal with it when it cracks.

The Amazon business model starts with selection. If it’s good for the customer, you can get traffic, lower your cost structure, lower your prices, have more sellers, get more customers.

In 1995 Amazon had 1 million books in store. That was the selection part. Now, there are other merchants who sell on the Amazon platform. In fairness, if their prices are lower than Amazon’s, they get preferred space on the page. Discovery of their products is also improved because of Amazon’s long tail.

Amazon’s continuous growth is fueled by ultra-scalable technology. Every year, we scale the technology. Internally, it is now a service-oriented architecture. That is the platform we built our applications on.

What does scalability really mean? It means that if you add resources to the system, performance needs to increase proportionately. It also means being able to handle larger data sets. If you have to add nodes to the system, the performance of the system should not suffer.

If new nodes are faster and bigger, you should be able to exploit that. The more nodes you add, the less people you should need to maintain them.

Amazon went through stages where all of these things were not true.

Target was the first customer of the enterprise services. Our interaction with Target made us realize Amazon could be a platform, not just an application. Now we have content generation and discovery; identity management; order processing, payments and fraud protection; fulfillment and customer service; and product offers and management.

Amazon enterprise is always on, scalable, cost-effective.

The traditional Amazon web services were built using Amazon data. Other applications have been built on top, e.g., backup manager, that use data belonging to others.

Military Networking

John Garstka - Office of Transformation, US Dept. of Defense.

Kevin introduced him highlighting the Dense connectivity - Convergence happening and how the military enterprise that is huge and defines concept of mission critical.

Here is my summary based on his talk.  Innovations in Networked Organization
We spend 20 billion a year on IT stuff (wow that is a lot of money).

Tech on large scale...has a lot of people and process issues....who is in Charge? How do you choreograph all these.  My organization is working on trying to get the technology.

My organization is trying to get to the technology and networks but has industrial organizational incentives

Network Centric Warfare

Information Advantage is a Warfighting advantage - when networked - you can do business better

Use information to generate and advantage. Not just substituting
Factor in cognitive and social domains - subtle relationships.

There is a big difference between the Low end and high end.
People are learning languages - like Farssi now.

There was a a really complex diagram that basically went like this:
Robustly Networked Force -> Information Sharing ->Quality of information -> (Common Picture ) -> Individual Situational Awareness -> Shared Situational Awareness and Collaboration -> Self Synchronization (New processes) -> Mission effectiveness

Gulf War - we could see where the tanks were.
Where are the Bad Guys? Where are the good guys?

HOW DOES THE NETWORK ORGANIZATION BEHAVE?
If you know that answer you can be more effective.

Create experiments where the value proposition is putting 10,000 of people on the network doing things in new ways.

Technology process and The Technology Tenants.  How do I use the technology and link to outcome process Organizational people component is really hard? Collaboration is a group activity and you need the incentive infrastructure right so that it happens. Technology enables new process.  Try to understand these relationships...powerful competitive advantage.

Innovation is not a one dimensional thing.

Revolutions in Military Affairs
WW1 Tank shows up but the process didn’t change
WW2 The process innovation happened

Looks simple in PPT really hard to do in big organizations
Who is in charge?

Question: Large Centralized organizations the technology extend contributions to a broader range is there tension between top down and bottom up? 

A good example is Company Commander.com Captains Major
Enemy was innovating - put up website to share insights in real time. Army said really good - pulled innovation in and made it secure.  We have today - virtual staff.

Bottom end of the spectrum innovation working well - I want to survive.  Top...bureaucratic knife fights.  Future combat system - things vs. technology. Investments in Billions of dollars very top down - these investments allow bottom up. The network is there it but the incentives are not there to collaborate. 

We have found that nobody owns all this. Lots of people who say they own lots of

Conclusions

Getting the Theory Right
- IMportant to long term sustained investment in IT

Making the Business Case
- improve co-evolution of TEchnology. Organizations, Processes, and People in conducting REturn on Investment analysis

Deploying IT Infrastructure
- How good does the networked infrastructure need to be?
It depends

Operating Networked Organizations
- need to co-evolve TEchnology, Organization, Processes and People to achieve full benefits of Networking.

Perspective: John Garstka, USDoD

John Garstka, Office of Force Transformation, U.S. Dept. of Defense, offers A Perspective in Innovation in Networked Organizations. (Text is not verbatim.)

I contributed to Network Centric Warfare, a book that attempted to find out if networking mattered in the military. We looked at the trade-offs between investing in applications or infrastructure. We asked, why should we spend money on networking?

When you’re networked, you can do things in the info domain much better and faster. That impacts how you organize, train and deploy your forces. Generals talk about advantages in the physical domain – position and force advantage. The information advantage is less well understood.

We’re finding you have to factor in cognitive and social domains when you interpret information. At the service academies, for example, they’re learning the languages of the places where they’ll operate.

To make sense of complex relationships, we developed a value chain. It starts with the relationship between networking and information sharing. As you move across the value chain, you hit a chasm between those who understand the tech and those who don’t. When innovation happens at the intersection of these two domains, there’s a problem.

We try to understand what really matters. Military operations are a team event, doing things collectively. Shared situational awareness can be enabled by blue force tracking, which reveals where forces are deployed. It was enabled by networking apps on tanks, helicopters and commercial satcom. That affected the speed and tempo of combat.

If you’re in maneuvers, you want to look at what everyone can see at the same time. It’s not about deploying tech, but changing how an organization collaborates and assigns info and decision rights. The discussion is about how the networked organization behaves.

We don’t have good simulations to answer these questions. To figure out where the value proposition is, we put people on the network and watched. In general, we learned:

People use the tech because they want to do something. If you don’t have the right incentives in place for collaboration, it doesn’t happen.

There is tight coupling between the tech and the process. Often, the tech enables new processes. You need to understand the relationship between the processes, and how people interact during the process.

Sometimes tech leads the way. But you need a process innovation to reap the award of the tech. If the innovation is disruptive, there’s an impediment to adoption. In really big organizations, there’s a tension between top down and bottom up innovation.

At the top of the ecosystem, there are bureaucratic disputes. At the bottom, people just want to survive. When you talk about investing billions of dollars in infrastructure, you have to think through the adoption curve. You can have the network, but people may not be motivated to collaborate on it.

None of these technologies are independent. People who own the tech innovation have to figure out how to work together, so their tech can interoperate.

Given a fixed budget, the challenge is to figure out what technology will impact your core competency. Whether you’re in commerce, defense or government, you may not get as much tech as you need. Figure out whose job it is to synchronize tech evolution.

Rise of the Videonet

Starting with a Mentos and Diet Coke videos by eepybird.com, moderator JD Lasica of Ourmedia talks about the future of consumer generated video content on the Web with panelists:

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove
Jonathan Taplin, USC Annenberg Center
Mary Hodder, Dabble
Robert Levitan, Pando

Here are a few highlights of the conversation:

Q: What does the current IPTV universe look like?

Brightcove: The UGC sites aren’t generating meaningful revenue yet. Media are experimenting with video ads. Any organization that wants to communicate on the web will have to have some sort of video presence. Traditional media are launching TV networks on the web.

Q: How big a role will Hollywood play in the IPTV landscape?

USC: As founder of the first video on demand service in 1996, we had subscribers paying for content until the producers stopped licensing content to us and launched their own site. In the long term, people will want to watch the Hollywood movies. Until we get video stores online, Hollywood will play a blocking role. With Steve Jobs getting closer to Disney management, we’re getting closer to advertiser supported content.

Q: How are companies differentiating themselves in the online video space?

Dabble: There are sites where users can upload content and sites that are only for downloading. Users have flocked to YouTube, where 35,000 videos a day are uploaded. YouTube has 42 percent of traffic. MySpace is second with 24 percent. The activity that happens bottom up is different than top down. Top down production has a budget, unions and top-down controls. When users make something, they just shoot. There’s a lot of garbage, but non-professionals also make some incredible stuff. A number of hosts offer a free site for uploading, then generate revenue on the backend by hosting commercial video sites like the National Hockey League video site.

Q: With high def video starting to hit, will we be talking about P2P next year?

Pando: The Internet can’t be the distribution platform for the very large files like TV shows and Hollywood movies. On the other side is the UGC. Not everyone wants to publicly share all their videos. P2P, from desktop to desktop, will be all about the bandwidth.

Q: Social norms around rich media are shifting. What are the implications for copyright holders?

Dabble: If you look through the videos that have been made around mentos and coke, there were an number made before the ones that got the publicity. One producer put videos on Revver, which does a revenue split. If a referring site sends traffic, they share revenue with that affiliate. The video got them a chunk of revenue. But then the video file was spread around to other sites. The producer loves that others are watching it, but they’re not making any money.

Q: In the question of Hollywood or UGC, where will the most activity be? Will anyone care about UGC in 10 years?

USC: Hollywood will start to use mashups in interesting ways, and let people post them for free. They shouldn’t fight them. In two years, will anyone care about mentos and coke? I don’t think so.

Brightcove: Copyright holders want to empower consumers to use that content, but drive revenue through that use. The challenge distributors have is, they’re held hostage by the upstream groups – screen actors guild, directors guild, etc. They don’t want the art destroyed. The legal and business conundrum needs to be solved so creators, talent and consumers and all generate revenue. Creative pirating will continue until then.

Dabble: Friends watch video productions by their friends. They’re not concerned about production values. The askaninja video about net neutrality has been viewed by about 5 million people. But you need to separate the good stuff from the bad with better filters.

Q: Will we see remix phase out or take off?

Dabble: Most of remix culture now is parody. The issue is control. People want to be compensated for their contributions. The harder issue is attribution. Do you let someone chop up something and remake it, and thereby assume ownership of it? The younger generation has a different media literacy than the older generation. They may be OK with loss of control and care more about attribution. Other types of videos we see are genre, indie film makers and documentaries, interviewers and anime music videos. Each genre is strong, but they don’t get play at the top down media. It’s highly watched.

As production costs come down, every web site will become a video producer and distributor and allow consumer participation in that by having them contribute training films, etc. The creative marketers are asking people to take their brands and do something with it to generation excitement.

All is Not Well in Washington

I thought I would introduce myself just getting here today after arriving from the Identity Mashup at Harvard earlier in the week.  I am Identity Woman and also blog on unconferences.

The first session of the morning FCC Commissioner Copps gave a great opening talk about the critical digital issues facing America and how much the small and medium sized innovative companies need to speak up in Washington and bring it to the American people.

I am not a verbatim typer so here is my summary of what he said.

Commissioner Copps articulated the need for a holistic approach to communication technologies. 

Access to broad band technology should be considered an all american right.  Government, Business and logical communities have all partnered in our history to build out infrastructure starting with the waterways and canals in the east, the transcontinental railway, and more recently the interstate highway network.  Working together around a ‘great national objective’ is how we grew as a country.

Our future will be decided by how we master new communication systems. We are 15th in the world in broadband penetration - when first at the FCC5 years ago we used to be 4th in the world. I think America’s broadband ox is in the ditch...

Right now 200kb is called broadband - how 1997 can you get?
There were goals for broadband in the last election to have universal affordable broadband by 2007 - we are three months away from that date and not close to that goal.

What is the FCC doing about this? It reclassified broadband from a title 2 service to a title 1. What this meant was that the nondiscrimiation rules that did apply no longer applied.  At my urging the FCC wrote a statement of basic rights of the internet end user - consumers to 1) access content, 2) run applications and services, 3) connect devices 4) enjoy competition.  This planted the seed of the dialogue around net-nuetrality - Act 1 if you will.

Act 2 is the dialogue in congress about this. 

Websites might have to pay more tolls if first class is going to be reserved for websites that pay extra tolls.  The practical effect of what is being proposed to inver the real democratic genius of the web. Changing this by making the pipe intelligent and the user dumb.  Companies will have to ask permission to innovate.  We must work to preserve the openness that makes it successful. When content and connectivity get fused - vertical integration threatens innovation.

In the media world we have seen changes - alarming increase in media consolidation with the ownership of production and distribution and cornering the market on creativity.  This is a threat for innovation and diversity.  Two days ago the FCC began the most proceeding to open this year - deciding what future of media is going to look like.  A few years ago we (over my objections) eliminated important safeguards.  They aloud single community a company could own three television stations, six radio stations, the cable service and newspaper and internet access.

When we did this three million americans wrote and call us to task for what we had done.  That outpouring of sentiment and congress spoke up - senate voted twice - (congress was not aloud to vote on this) and the courts sent us back the rules we had made to start at square one.

We need an open public transparent process.  Look at what is going on before we vote. We now have a fighting chance to get it right.  It is an Internet Freedom issue rather then Net Nutrality.

Some have been expecting that the internet is going hault media consolidation but it could be heading down the very same road.  We need independent voices - there is such a ray of hope for more diversity and local coverage and democratic dialogue so the American people can make intelligent decisions.

I would like your help. Issues are to important to leave to the beltway regulars. We need your input - more of your input then we have been getting. Small and medium sized enterprises rather then just the large tech firms.  The country needs the high tech community to jump into the washington fray - real serious effort and commitment they have been there from time immemorial - fully armed and robustly financed. If I was a handicapper putting odds on would give them a pretty good chance. The struggle ahead is deep and dark...But we have a chance now to realize potential…

The only way you win is to make sure not biz as usual taking this struggle to all of America. There are millions of american citizens who would help you make sure the wonderful things you have brought us server the wonderful things you have in mind..
There are opportunities to work together to open whole new world of digital possibilities…

These new information technologies are an essential driver of american. Government and stake-holders must build together like we have always.

There was a resounding round of applause including people standing.

Perspective: Michael Copps, FCC

Public policy will affect the future of this industry. Issues like net neutrality create a growing recognition that we need to engage in the public policy discussion.

Commissioner Michael Copps of the FCC cuts right to the chase: All is not well in Washington in terms of dealing with these new products and services. We need to do something about that.

This period of disruptive change in tech, business plans and policy will shape the future of broadband, internet and the media. We need to take a holistic approach.

Public policy priorities: broadband, which is fundamental to what the FCC does. His mission is to bring the best, most cost-effective communication system to all the people in the country. He says: Access to communications is an all American civil right.

Broadband is the great network and infrastructure challenge of our time. They are the roads, railways and canals of this age. We need to build out broadband connectivity. Right now, the US is 15th in the world in broadband penetration.

The FCC calls 200 kilobits broadband. That’s the ‘90s. We have a national broadband goal of universal access by 2007. With six months to go to the end of the year, we’re not going to meet that goal.

We could have a wider digital gap between haves and have nots – urban / rural America – in advance telecommunications. We have not national strategy to avoid that.

Starting with basics: The FCC has to collect data and get facts about our current situation. Today we assume that if there is a single subscriber to broadband in one zip code, then it is available throughout that zip code.

We need to compare the cost per bit in the US to that in other countries, and study what other countries are doing. Countries with lower population densities have better coverage than the US. How did they do it?

Based on what we learn from this research, we need to tee up options for Congress to look at—lay out the options in an analytical way.

We need more bandwidth, and more competition in the bandwidth supply.

Net Neutrality: As we migrate to broadband, decentralized end user control is increasingly at risk. There are fewer broadband providers, controlling the pipeline – about 98 percent of the broadband market. Too many consumers lack a choice.

If the market is truly competitive, the government can get out of the way and let the service flourish. Being asked to pay a premium to use more bandwidth creates the specter of broadband providers controlling where you go and what you do on the internet.

Some providers may try this. That could end in bad pubic policy.

The new classification as a Title 1 Information Service takes away the protection of broadband from being regulated. The commission has come up with a statement of basic rights, which plant the seeds for a dialog about net neutrality.

Providers of broadband look for new business models, even suggesting that sites that generate traffic pay a toll to get that traffic. If first class access is available only to those who pay, that relegates everyone else to steerage.

We need to do everything we can to ensure the internet remains open and democratic. If distributors control content and conduit, they can keep others out.

In the media world, there is an alarming increase in media consolidation, resulting in fewer outlets and properties. They own production and distribution, cornering the market on creativity. The FCC has begun again to decide what the future of media will look like, shaping ownership of TV, radios and cable.

Safeguards that foster media diversity are being removed. Is it good to give one corporation sweeping power in a local market? The court took the FCC to takes for giving that power in the past. This time, the process will be more open, and invite public comment.

This relates to the internet freedom issue. Net neutrality is one high voltage rail in the consolidation debate. The more concentration ownership, the tighter the distribution, the more the Internet is at risk.

If you care about diversity in your news and information, creativity in our entertainment, open dialog for more intelligent decisions – we can’t let a few giants subvert the system.

As the FCC grapples with these issues, the commission needs more input from small and medium sized enterprises, as well as the large high tech firms. Decisions without you are most often decisions against you.

It will take serious effort and commitment. The opposition is robustly financed. By doing some political work, you can make sure it’s not a business as usual process. Take your story all across America. Tell people what is at stake. Enlist allies. You can have an impact on the debate.

Q: Net neutrality passed the house and is on it’s way to the Senate. What’s going to happen?
A: I don’t make predictions. The challenge is to make sure the serious propositions move forward. Senate markup of the legislation is underway.

Q: There is little research and analysis going on right now. How do we raise the level of research?
A: Others define the debate politically, analysts define it commercially. We need to demonstrate to decision makers what the success stories are. What’s going on around the country. We need to change the terms of the debate.

Q: What kind of partnerships and alliances can be formed?
A: People want to go the same direction but have a different bottom line. Figure out a common message for now. That will enable you to have critical mass around the country. You have to put differences aside momentarily.

Q: What can the government do to open more wireless spectrum for broadband access?
A: We working on that, setting rules of the road for using it. 

Thursday, June 22, 2006

More Than Just a Game

Where will we take technology originally developed for games? This panel looks at how to apply gaming technology, skills and behaviors in the business environment.

Moderator: Dan Hunter, The Wharton School
Amy Jo Kim, Shufflebrain
Doug Failor, Joint Futures Lab, DOD
Michael Zyda, USC Gamepipe Lab
Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab
Charles Moore, Reuters

JFL: As a contractor for the defense department, I play video games for a living. At the Joint Forces Command, the mission is military transformation. The right equipment and training are critical. JFL explores and validates theories. One of the tools we use is computer simulations, which enable you to test decisions ahead of time and predict the results. Because games are sophisticated simulations, we can learn about cause and effect, long term vs. short term goals, patterns in chaos, complex system behaviors, counter intuitive results, motivation by obstacles, persistence and experimentation to solve a problem.

Reuters: Reuters core business is news, then using that news to support financial professionals in delivering training. We set up an innovation program like a venture fund, where we choose 6-8 spaces to look for ideas for subsequence investment. In Learning from the Virtual World (games), we immersed ourselves in the gaming space to take back proposals for investment to the venture board. They’re interested in the user interface, and how we can apply it to our interface. For training, we can learn how users learn from within games.

Shufflebrain: We’re a design consultancy doing design and strategy for games. By going into game mechanics and what makes them compelling, we can create better, more addictive games. Games shape behavior by leveraging primary response patterns. Giving positive or negative feedback on a schedule provokes a particular response. Slot machines use semi random payoffs with large or small payoffs, creating addictive behaviors. The power of reinforcement and feedback makes games work. By engaging us in flow, increasing the challenge as your skills increase, games keep people playing. The underlying mechanics can be applied to other software. These are the drivers of behavior including: collecting things, earning points, feedback, exchanges or interaction, customization. For example, character customization or personas.

USC Game Lab: When you consider how much time people spend in negotiations, there’s value in training them to be better negotiators using games and emotional response sensors.

Linden Lab: We talk about Second Life as being like the Internet, only three dimensional. The difference is, you experience it with other people. Second Life takes the context and puts people in it at the same time, so they can build on each others knowledge. It’s an amplifier that enables you to interact with people while they’re in your site.

Q: Have you noticed a generational change where games play a more significant role?

Reuters: We see that to a great extent. The game generation has already started to penetrate the workforce. We see the parallels in gaming that apply to the business world. But there is a significant majority in the business world who aren’t’ involved in the gaming space. The younger generation may see applications, but the senior managers don’t get it.

USC Game Lab: The line where game playing stops is around 35 years of age. We’re developing a game development program at USC. Kids are fascinated with games. By analogy, you can drive any car, if you now how to drive. Games are like that, if you’re in the game playing generation. Older players don’t have the metaphors to work with.

Q: What lessons do we learn from games about user interface design?

Shufflebrain: If you look at the example of eBay, you make it more game like by creating anticipation and randomness and putting in a reputation system. Then there’s the notion of emergent exchanges or back and forth exchanges. When an auction closes, people trade reviews. On MySpace, they make guestbook comments in exchange for being added to a list. You can allow room for emergent behaviors, rather then making the interface too restrictive.

Q: How does the social environment evolve?

Second Life: You can see the landscape, where you site fits into the environment. The cities emerge around people with shared interests. It’s a hyper accelerated demonstration of web 2.0 behavior, building businesses together, collaborating, all within context of the virtual society. Putting up a forum on eBay amplified the excitement. You can have a bad clothing store in Second Life, but the social support drives excitement.

Q: do people choose these environments instead of the real world?

USC: the line will be between people who do and don’t understand games. People who are fascinated with massively multiplayer games might do it. But will be a while before a majority can.

Q: What are the social ramifications of an online fantasy world that takes over their reality?

Shufflebrain: as a parent, we put limits on the amount of gaming. When my seven year old plays too many games, the rest of life becomes boring. He gets personalized feedback in the game. Any media can be indulged in too much. Common sense, involved parenting is needed. Social games teach valuable lessons that translate into the real world. Every powerful tech is a double edged sword. They need to be understood well and used in an informed way.

Second Life: you have to compare the learning per unit time. Second Life is a rich environment for facing real constraints as you develop a business. In terms of safety, they’re safe when they’re not alone. When there are a lot of people around, there’s safety in numbers.

Q: wireless gaming industry in Asia?

USC: looking for cool tech in Japan, you find people are into gadgets. Wireless does well there. In the US, mobile games are just now gaining traction. The problem with mobile games is that the phones have different interfaces and keys. What works on a Motorola won’t work on a nokia. When there is more standardization, we’ll see the push from what is happening in Asia.

Q: why are games so compelling, when people are so time challenges they can’t manager their first life, much less a second life?

USC: world of war craft, the average user plays an enormous number of hours. When kids buy world of war craft and start playing, we see it in their grades. It’s highly addictive.

Dan: You create social connections and spend time chatting in the guild room. You start to lose your assumptions about the necessity for physical interaction in order to have meaningful social interaction.

Second Life: You will need to get a Second Life account because, as it relates to innovation, economy, prototyping, things are happening faster there than they do in the physical world. People are funding companies, growing, learning and doing things together much faster there.

Q: How would these services take advantage of expanded bandwidth and faster processing power.

USC: you always need more. You add emotion sensing. You draw different graphics and sound. We’ll use all the processing cycles available.

Second Life: computer games don’t look like movies now, but in five years, they’ll look more like movies. Now you can’t simulate all the objects in a room. You need to simulate more objects to be fully believable. We’ll reach better parity with reality given more bandwidth. We’ll make the effective bandwidth person to person wider.