Life and commerce in the connectivity of clouds

Nicholas Carr in his book The Big Switch describes how Edison transformed society, by being able to generate and deliver electricity through a connected network that was previously thought impossible – or had not even been though about at all.

The idea of an electricity grid – an interconnected network delivery electricity to busnesses first and then homes had in fact until Edison not been conceived.

Carr writes,

The commercial and social ramifications of the democratisation of electricity would be hard to overstate. electric light altered the rhythms of life, electric assemble lines redefined industry and work, and electric appliances brought the industrial revolution into the home. Cheap and plentiful electricity shaped the world we live in today. It’s a world that did not exist 100 years ago, and yet the transformation that has played out over just a few generations has been so great so complete, that it has become almost impossible for us to imagine what life was like before electricity began to flow through the sockets in our walls.

Communications-Transformation

And information technology is under-going a similar evolution today argues JD. Lasica in the Aspen Institute report on Identity and cloud computing The report goes onto say, that, one should think of the cloud not just literally, as an information technology infrastructure, but as a metaphor for this new frontier of democratizing possibilities that these disruptive new communication technologies herald.

And more big picture stuff

A SAP white paper released in September 2008 warned that policy-makers are not aware of the dramatic economic impact of the “Future Internet,” as the paper calls the cloud. The report concluded: “The next generation of the Internet enabled by software will lead to the most signi?cant changes in the economy in the next decade. It will drive productivity gains in many industries and shape the future of the services sector in all knowledge-based economies.”

This, then, is the new computing ecosystem: data centers serving as huge factories for computing services on an industrial scale; software being delivered as a service over the Internet; wireless networks linking all of this together, letting us access data, services—and each other.

Nicholas Carr takes the view that the most advanced uses of utility computing are aimed not at companies but us – people, individuals.

I wonder what this implies for what media and commercial worlds we are creating? if we thought that the world we are in fact creating was already in 5th gear – I think we need to look at the stick shift to understand we are probably only in 2nd gear.

We are decoupling from the 19th and 20th Centuries – philosophically, technologically, culturally, and commercially. Creating a new society, always demands we destroy the old, as we pull our age out of the captivity of the last one.

The Aspen report cites

All forms of content will be digitized and flowing through IP-based networks where data, audio and video have converged. As this happens, most of the applications and data storage that now reside on PCs and local servers will migrate to The Cloud, and computing wil l become a commodity utility service. Vendors will supply capacity on-demand. As this happens, Web 2.0 will extend into all aspects of commercial interaction as the pul l model of commerce becomes the norm with Web 3.0.

We are the midwives to a new way of doing things

The prediction is that, “if and when this occurs, the cloud will significantly alter many institutions and businesses as we know them today (as voice, video and data eventually converge in the cloud).” And of course we are already have witnessed the groundswell of change. We are the midwives to a new way of doing, creating, organising and trading. The Aspen report outlines the commercial implications

The rise of the cloud may well foretell dramatic shifts in the commercial sector. No longer do start-ups need to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in angel seed funding to acquire the servers and technical infrastructure it takes to get a business off the ground. As cloud platforms become accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, entrepreneurs with a better idea or service will attain instant global reach for even the smallest niche product or service. A new generation of systems will arise for barter, escrow, authentication and authorization. Potentially this will lead to lower costs for products and services as well as greater customer convenience in pulling what we want when we want it. Yet the same trends could very well lead to greater volatility and disruption, destabilizing industries and market leaders and over-rewarding winners.

I argue that our world of business, media, and communications is evolving from the straight-lines of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature. This interactive networked world isn’t about vertical silos, traditional notions of product and service creation, mass-production and mass media and marketing. It is about the massive flows of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organising and creating in a manner that has nothing to do with a linear approach too much at all. This is truly an engaged and participatory culture.

The Networked Society

Identity and the intention economy

Looming just over the horizon is the third incarnation of online identity—call it identity in the cloud. Experts are at work trying to design a “user-centric open identity network,” or a new “identity layer of the Web” that would give all of us the ability to manage, to some extent, our identities—that is, both our Web presence and of?ine identity. The idea is an identity system that is
scalable (so it works everywhere), user-centric (ser ving your interests, instead of something done to you by outside interests) and, importantly, customizable. This new system would recognize that each of us has multiple identities. We will be able to spoon out bits and pieces of our identity, depending on the social or business context we ?nd ourselves in.

Doc Searls, a longtime promoter of digital identity who teaches at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, believes such a system could supplant the advertising industry with an “intention economy” that gives users control of their own attention and leads them to products, services, subjects and ideas that interest them.18 An “intention economy” gives users control of their own attention and leads them to products, services, subjects and ideas that interest them.

In a recent presentation to the Helsinki School of economics I asked, what is Advertising? People will think of TV spots, billboards, magazine double page spreads, classified ads, Direct mail etc., These are however merely the furniture of advertising. And don’t you think its interesting that even within the world of the Internet inventory is bought and sold using furniture that was created hundreds of years ago and we still seem to be obssessed with outdatede and outmoded furniture. This furniture is built upon a push model. But in a world where we actively search for information – this model can be turned on its head to deliver more relevant and meaningful commercial communication.

When you ask people if they use a search engine – 99% put their hands up – I ask them what are they searching for? Relevant, contextual timely information – information. Not interruptive, irrelevant communication. This is the legacy of the past and this is the past we are breaking away from.

People do need brands and brands do need people, its just that in the 21st Century we can help those brands and those people to find each other when they need each other the most. For businesses it big question they have to ask themselves is – how do I play a meaningful role in the daily fabric of peoples lives?

The convergence of identity and data, is creating a great deal of interest and I believe we will be building businesses of the near future from these two key factors.

For example, There is a service is called Otetsudai Networks, which literally means “help networks”. It is a mobile phone service in Japan where anyone can register and fill in the kinds of skills they have available, say window-cleaning or washing dishes or loading boxes at a warehouse, etc. Then there are temporary employers who have short-term needs. Say a shopkeeper has a sudden illness and the one assistant has to leave the shop early. The shopkeeper needs someone who is reasonably qualified temporary help for his store. Just enter the need (4 hours this afternoon selling shoes at the store in this address at this shopping mall, cash register operation skills needed, pays x per hour). Then those who are near that location, who have indicated that their status is available to do temporary work, will get the alert.

Otetsudai Networks

Twelve features of the cloud economy that will transform business:

1. Greater global reach
2. Greater customization
3. Reduced barriers to entry
4. The end of scale
5. Easier entry into adjacent markets
6. Greater specialization
7. Greater innovation and experimentation
8. Greater information transparency
9. Greater organizational complexity
10. Faster turnaround times and greater speed to market
11. Greater competitive intensity and disruption of existing markets
12. A shift from marketing push to customer pull.

The real impact of cloud computing may be this: in the future, everyone becomes an entrepreneur. In a 2008 report, Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote:

No government initiative or five-year strategic plan could have hoped to have achieved anything so profound—Google and Amazon are literally pushing the frontiers of global capitalism right down to the teenager’s bedroom. Forget cutting lawns or waiting tables to earn some money, the next generation of college kids are more likely to pay for tuition by showing the world how to play the riff in Weezer’s Sweater song by Rivers Cuomo.

Lauren Luke, who lives in Tynesdie, UK, has found her niche in the cloud. Her business model? She applies makeup, videotapes the process, uploads the tutorial to YouTube and gets an ad split from Google. Thousands of other global entrepreneurs are running similar microbusinesses. If the roundtable participants are right, that number will grow to hundreds of millions in the decades ahead as the cloud becomes ubiquitous.“The cloud represents the reinvention of commerce…the control point has shifted so that suddenly commerce and communication are end to end, with no regard to borders.”

This report is extraordinary, and I would recommend anyone that is interested in what our society will look like read it.

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