Recently in The Future of Technology Category

Adobe has just announced the Open Screen Project, a broad-based initiative to push Flash’s reach across all digital platforms, including mobile and television. Supporters include BBC, Cisco, Motorola, MTV, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and a host of other consumer technology, content, and mobile companies.

When Living Networks was launched in 2002, I wrote about how Macromedia (which has since been acquired by Adobe) used an open strategy to make Flash a standard in rich media on the web:

Whenever you go to a website and are presented with a snazzy animated introduction, you are seeing Macromedia Flash at work. The free Flash Player software that enables people to view these animations is now running on around 97% of PCs that are connected to the Internet. At the outset, Macromedia had a clear-cut challenge. Web surfers would only download Flash Player if there were interesting websites using Flash, while website designers would only use Flash if a sufficient proportion of their target audience had installed the software. Macromedia makes its money by selling the software for developers to create Flash files, but to make it a viable market it had to give away the Flash Player software.

So far the primary theme of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco seems to be openness and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which I defined in our Web 2.0 Framework as “A defined interface to a computer application or database that allows access by other applications.” Web companies new and old are announcing APIs that provide access to the data that resides on their site.

ReadWriteWeb writes about the next frontier after ubiquitous APIs, an interview of Web 2.0 keynoter Max Levchin focuses on the implications of APIs on every application, and Tim O’Reilly in his keynote says that the paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power.

In the last weeks I’ve been looking across what is available on APIs, and it is quite extraordinary. Driven significantly by the impetus of Google’s leadership, over the last couple of years the industry has taken a massive turn towards openness, making it hard to run online initiatives any other way.

I am finding myself completely staggered by the possibilities. There are so many ways that this vast trove of information can be used in new and innovative applications. ReadWriteWeb's article provides a list of the ways APIs can be used. Some of the promising areas I see include:

Content aggregation. Despite the existing proliferation of blog and feed aggregators, there are many more opportunities to create highly specialized content aggregators, bringing together the web’s most relevant content in niche domains.

Collaborative filtering. The richness of information about people’s content preferences available from something like FriendFeed (or the individual feeds that go into it) make it possible to correlate taste across media and genres.

Latent social networks: Suggesting friends or connections based not just on profile or musical tastes, but an integrated view of preferences and activities. This could be particularly powerful in dating.

Alex Beam, the award-winning writer for the Boston Globe, has written his latest column about the Extinction Timeline, which was co-created by Future Exploration Network and What's Next (and displayed below - click on the image for the full timeline as a pdf). Alex interviewed me last week, and extracted from our wide-ranging conversation thoughts on the demise of newspapers, national currencies, public libraries, butchers, British royalty, and far more.

Alex concludes his analysis of our timeline by examining my penchant for robot pets, and concludes that “I have seen the future, and it may need oil.”

The availability of online services exchanges has been changing the nature of the online development business for a couple of years. Over two years ago in a blog post titled The rise of online services exchanges I described how sites such as elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, and getafreelancer.com were globalizing services and tech development, and rapidly commoditizing fees to get work done.

Today Techcrunch has written about someone in Turkey who is asking on getafreelancer.com for a clone of Tangler.com, and is willing to pay $1500 for it. In an interesting coincidence, I caught up with Martin Wells, CEO of Tangler, at an event at Stanford University on Thursday evening, and we were talking about the online service exchanges, though more with a bent to getting work done.

Daniel on DRM finds other people looking for clones of Digg, eBay, Twitter and other leading online sites. I’m surprised that this is seen as noteworthy. None of this is new. Well over a year ago I saw over a dozen requests for Digg clones on Rentacoder. Has this resulted in the demise of Digg? Hardly. There are a few factors at play here.

The first is what the commentators today have focused on: the bidders are rather unlikely to create a worthwhile clone of these online sites for what they are getting paid. It shouldn’t be too hard to emulate a fairly simple site like Digg, though the rich functionality of Tangler is a bit more of a handful. Certainly you can’t expect robust, quality code at this kind of price.

Alongside our corporate strategy consulting and research work in the media and technology space, Future Exploration Network has created a Web 2.0 Framework to share openly. Click here or on any of the images below to download the Framework as a pdf (713KB).

The intention of the Web 2.0 Framework is to provide a clear, concise view of the nature of Web 2.0, particularly for senior executives or other non-technical people who are trying to grasp the scope of Web 2.0, and the implications and opportunities for their organizations.

There are three key parts to the Web 2.0 Framework, as shown below:

Web 2.0 Framework
* Web 2.0 is founded on seven key Characteristics: Participation, Standards, Decentralization, Openness, Modularity, User Control, and Identity.
* Web 2.0 is expressed in two key Domains: the Open web, and the Enterprise.
* The heart of Web 2.0 is how it converts Inputs (User Generated Content, Opinions, Applications), through a series of Mechanisms (Technologies, Recombination, Collaborative Filtering, Structures, Syndication) to Emergent Outcomes that are of value to the entire community.

Web 2.0 Definitions
* We define the Web 2.0 Characteristics, Domains, and Technologies referred to in the Framework.
* Ten definitions for Web 2.0 are provided, including the one I use to pull together the ideas in the Framework: “Distributed technologies built to integrate, that collectively transform mass participation into valuable emergent outcomes.”

Web 2.0 Landscape
* Sixty two prominent Web 2.0 companies and applications are mapped out across two major dimensions: Content Sharing to Recommendations/ Filtering; and Web Application to Social Network. The four spaces that emerge at the junctions of these dimensions are Widget/ component; Rating/ tagging; Aggregation/ Recombination; and Collaborative filtering. Collectively these cover the primary landscape of Web 2.0.

As with all our frameworks, the Web 2.0 Framework is released on a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use it and build on it as they please, as long as there is attribution with a link to this blog post and/ or Future Exploration Network. The framework is intended to be a stimulus to conversation and further thinking, so if you disagree on any aspect, or think you can improve on it, please take what is useful, leave the rest, and create something better.

In the Framework document we also mention our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2007, which will be held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco this July 18/17. In the same spirit as this Web 2.0 Framework, we will be releasing substantial research, framework, and other content on the Future of Media in the lead-up to our event, continuing the tradition from the Future of Media Strategic Framework and Future of Media Report 2006 that we released last year. Hope this is all useful!

Following the big success of the Trend Blend 2007+ trend map, Future Exploration Network partner organization Nowandnext.com has followed up with an Innovation Timeline 1900-2050. It represents visually (and as usual somewhat tongue in cheek) the development of innovation from 1900, starting with the tape recorder, safety razor, tabloid newspaper, aeroplane and cornflakes, and flowing up to 2050, before when we may see such fun, delightful, and useful things as baby exchanges, compulsory biometric ID, sleep surrogates, VR enhancing drugs, face recognition doors, robotic pest control, prison countries, 3D fax, gravity tube, self-repairing roads, reputation trading, individual pollution credits, digital mirrors, stress control clothing, and far, far more. Have a look and play with the ideas. It will be interesting to see whether this gets as much traction as the Trend Blend 2007+ trend map.

Click here to download the full Innovation Timeline 1900 - 2050 (pdf).

Also see Richard Watson's blog post on this.

Emily Chang has written about a project to aggregate all the information that flows through her life.

"As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway)."

She has now created a data stream that aggregates her blogs and websites, and usage of stylehive, del.icio.us, twitter, plazes, flickr, last.fm, and upcoming. There has been substantial interesting commentary on this initiative already, notably from Grant Robertson, Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa (including what an enterprise data stream may look like), and Stowe Boyd, who says he’s working on a similar initiative. Stowe writes:

"This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. Yes, we will want to have our traffic cached -- for search and analysis purposes -- but we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into.

A pal of yours is having a party? He will create the event using some social application site, and the event will be cast into his traffic. Your flow-aware calendar app might snag the event from the traffic, and ask you if you'd like to confirm. You agree, and the agreement is thrown into your traffic, for your buddy and others to make sense of, downstream."

For me, what this suggests is a world in which many people choose to expose all of their activities to the world. Del.icio.us is a great example. People used to favorite websites on their PC. Now many are happy to do it publicly, so other people can look at what they choose to make note of. Very importantly, this exposing of behaviors provides the foundation for Web 2.0, in that it provides input to allow collaborative filtering and the creation of “collective intelligence”. It seems that many people are thinking about and putting the mechanisms in place to expose all that we do, including our activities in socializing, entertainment, work, and more. Clearly not everyone will choose to expose their activities, yet many will – this has been proven over the last few years. From an enterprise perspective, implementing these kinds of exposing mechanisms inside organizations will allow far more effective knowledge work and business processes – but only after substantially new workflow and systems are put in place to synthesize this plethora of valuable information.

I’ve been interviewed a number of times recently about the future of mobile devices, both for media and also in financial services. I always emphasize the importance of the new generation of displays that are going to make viewing and interacting with mobile devices a great experience. People go on about how no-one wants to watch video on the screen on a mobile phone. In general, that’s true. But as soon as you can get larger screen experiences, everything changes. I’ve written before about the transformative power of video glasses, which I believe will become big over the next five years, and the role of e-paper. However the most likely candidates for broad mobile use are rollable and foldable screens, once they are in affordable commercial forms. Up until now most of these types of screens have been prototypes. One of the most exciting releases at the massive 3GSM conference in Barcelona was a rollable display from Readius, a spin-off from Philips. It gives a 127mm diagonal display that rolls out from a pocket-sized case. It has a high-quality screen and 10-day battery life. It won’t be commercially available until later this year, but we can expect competitors to come to market at a similar time, finally beginning to open up the doors to a rich mobile experience for all. As I’ve written before, one of the implications is an extraordinary surge in demand for content. This really will be transformative.

Source: Crave CNET.co.uk

Oh well, information sometimes flows a little more freely than intended… I wasn’t going to discuss this publicly until after the event, since it is invitation only, but since word is already out, I might as well start talking about it.

Future Exploration Network is kicking off the Future Exploration Network Series, a series of focused events that bring together leading thinkers to examine key business and technology issues. They will be attended by senior executives in business, technology, media, and government, and top journalists, by invitation only. The intention is to bring to life our organization’s tagline: Connecting Ideas and People at the Edge of the Future. The events will be extremely participatory, creating focused, relevant conversations between the highly selected attendees.

The first event will be titled Web 2.0 in Australia, and will be held in Sydney on 22 May, for just 2.5 hours over lunch. The preliminary information document, intended for sponsors and partners, was created this week, and given only to a very small group of potential sponsors. I also sent a copy to Brad Howarth, the journalist in Australia with probably the deepest understanding of this space. He posted the document on his website with some commentary, and as a result we’ve already had quite a bit of attention, including enquiries from additional potential sponsors. Since this is now in the public arena, here are more details.

The event summary:
The set of technologies and innovations described as Web 2.0 have transformed the internet, triggered an array of new business models, shifted internal communication, and provided powerful new marketing opportunities. This invitation-only senior executives forum will examine the state of Web 2.0 in Australia, including:
* Frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0
* Why progress has been slow in Australia
* Current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia
* Implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups, and marketing

There are in fact two good reasons to make the event public now:

Sponsors and partners
Let us know if you are a corporate, start-up, media organization, or association who would like to discuss getting involved. There is already strong interest in the two major roles, so sooner is better.

Showcase participants
Part of the event is a showcase of five of the best examples of Web 2.0 in Australia. We’ve already had quite a few suggestions, and of course are familiar with the more prominent examples. If you’d like to submit a company, technology, or implementation, please let us know. We will select what we believe are the best examples, which each will be showcased in a 5 minute presentation – there is no fee for participation. We are only interest in examples that are truly Web 2.0. A key element is that broad participation results in collective outcomes. We are keen to include enterprise applications as well as consumer and new media sites. We will create and launch a strategic framework for Web 2.0 in the lead-up to the event, which will clarify what we think is exciting in the space (or you can look at my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Revolution) . All suggestions and submissions welcome.

An article in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph says that a consortium of major mobile phone companies - Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia, and Cingular – are planning to meet in secret to discuss creating a mobile phone search engine. The last five years have shown that one of the most powerful places in the online space is search – that is many people’s primary interface to the wonderful world of the web. And you can make very good money from it (Google’s most recent quarterly operating income was $1.06 billion on revenues of $3.21 billion). So as attention shifts to the mobile world, there should be no shortage of players keen to challenge Google’s intentions of transferring its dominance in the internet into the mobile space.

A framework that I described in my book Living Networks, and have applied in numerous strategy consulting engagements, is highly relevant here. In short, there are six key elements to the “flow economy” based on the flow of information and ideas. Any customer offering needs all elements. These elements are usually provided by different companies, though some companies may provide several of them, or work in alliances to provide them seamlessly to customers. The heart of strategy in the flow economy is leveraging your existing positioning to move into other elements of the flow economy. A great example is how Apple, through the success of the iPod, controlled people’s Interface to music. This enabled them to shift to delivering Content through iTunes, and thus to build Relationships with consumers (which is usually not possible through the sale of devices).

In this case, the mobile phone companies provide Connectivity, and have been striving to leverage that into Relationships, Content, and Services, with highly varied success. If they can use their existing positioning across the landscape to control the Interface, they can get far greater revenues. Standards are the foundation of the flow economy, and Relationships are where most of the value can be extracted. Yet Interfaces (and also Content) have proven to be the most powerful leverage points to create Relationships. So the mobile phone consortium, Google, and other players are all trying to get to the same place, but starting from different positions on the strategic landscape. It will be a very interesting battle. This paragraph is of course an extremely simplistic analysis, but the framework can be used to go into far more depth in developing effective strategies. I’ll post some more detailed examples of using the flow economy framework at a later date.

In other commentary, PaidContent calls the Telegraph’s story “very speculative,” bringing up the highly relevant issue of EU anti-competition laws, while SMS Text News doesn’t believe the mobile companies can create a search engine good enough to rival Google. This post's title is "European Mobile Companies don't understand they're just data pipes." That's exactly my point above, however there exists a strategic possibility to shift beyond being just pipes to doing more, and they'd be very foolish if they didn't make a good attempt to do so.