Next Big Things

Posted by Mike Walsh

4/4/07 1:57 AM

When Time magazine features Web2.0 as its lead story, you know the profit party is probably over. Or at least, the cutting edge is elsewhere. At Tim O'Reilly's ETech conference in San Diego last week there were a few ideas about where that might be. Although the agenda was eclectic, the underlying theme was self evident. Consumers are not just more connected than ever before, they are more connected to each other. In the next few years, that is going to lead to not only new ways of doing business, but also radical new forms of behavior. While you are waiting for those, here are five memes to chew over.

Manufacturing 2.0

When Jacob DeHart and Jeffrey Kalmikoff got tired of making clever websites for other people, they decided to create something fun for themselves. The result was Threadless - a tshirt company where people submit designs and the community votes Digg style for which the ones that get manufactured. The secret of Threadless is more than just clever interaction. Its a new way of thinking about production. Only small quantities are made of any particular item, feedback and production are inseperable, and product marketing is replaced by customer participation from the outset. With 80,000 t-shirts selling a month, the duo are now expanding the concept to a range of other higher value products.

Pattern Recognition

Although more data is available than ever before, being able to see patterns in networked systems requires a subtle change of thinking. Fortunately, spotting changes is something that Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist at IBM's entity analytics business is good at. Before IBM he used to create software to help Casinos identify trends in their data flows that could reveal cheats or criminals trying to transact with them. The key to that, according to Jonas, is to turn operational systems into sensors. The problem with computers today, and even services like Google, is that they require you to ask smart questions at exactly the right time. However, whether its detecting possible terrorist activity or a sales opportunity, data in the future needs to find data - and let you know when situations change. Teaching computers to recognise when something matters and then publish it to people that are interested is the future of networked information systems.

Peak Shaving

If the amount of West Coast VC money flowing into energy innovation is any indication, the networks of the future may have more to do with power than information. At the moment, most power systems are wastefully engineered to meet the demands of peak periods. During those periods, every additional light switch requires a boost  from expensive spinning reserve generators.  One radical solution to shave those peaks is known as 'vehicle to grid' and contemplates a distributed network of consumer electric and hybrid cars which during peak periods could contribute power, and earn credits towards their energy bill. 

Collective Curation

Peter Bloom, Managing Partner at General Atlantic Partners, and economist Bill Janeway, former Vice Chairman of Warburg Pincus are about as Wall St as they come. In their view, over the last 25 years there has been a huge improvement in transactional efficiency, but an equal decrease in informational efficiency. Transactions are approaching a point of zero latency, but its becomming harder to get good information on which to act. Networked communities may start to change that. The pinstripe pair see a rise in sites like ValueInvestorsClub.com, where a limited pool of people share, track and rate each other based on the investment ideas they come up with. Tim O’Reilly puts it well. The essence of Web2.0 is that networked applications get better through participation. Its true collective intelligence.

Gridless

According to Tom Loosemore, Head of Innovations at the BBC, TV is broken. Programs remain a fantastic way to tell stories, but broadcasting is a very wasteful way of delivering television. When you turn it on you get a few dozen programs, most of which have already started. Figuring out how to let people access that archive has taken Tom and his team at the BBC on a long journey experimenting with new types of storage and P2P set top boxes. But the real issue in an era of unlimited choice, will be how to present what's available and help people decide what to watch. Certainly the era of the grid EPG, like the paper TV guide will soon come to end. Teenagers already discover most of their entertainment through referral. So if the future of schedules is social, what will they look like? Tom's not telling, but in his view, the real value of media platforms in the future will their capacity to create meta data that helps the discovery of content, rather than its simple distribution.

The common thread to all of these ideas is the network. Whether its energy systems, financial trading strategies or making tshirts - one way of looking at the Web2.0 revolution, is that it has given us a language to reconceive all kinds of other networked systems. Ajax is well and good, but really up until now, we have been mainly fiddling with interfaces. From here, things start to get interesting.

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