May 5, 2009
Maribel Lopez thinks mobility is like the start of A Tale of Two Cities: The best of times, in that never before have so many people been online and using digital services; and the worst of times, in that carriers don’t know what to do as their landline revenues plummet.
As Maribel and I discussed the slides leading up to her presentation today, I remembered James Bond’s watch in The Spy Who Loved Me. It had a printer in it that spooled out a ribbon of text. This struck me as fascinating: The writers couldn’t have Bond carry a personal communicator, because that would be unrealistic to the 1970s audience. As a result, his cigarette case is a microfilm reader, and his shoebrush is a listening device.
More recent Bond films promise a grittier, meaner Bond, stripped of gadgetry (and, given that it’s Daniel Craig, often of shirt.) Truth be told, Bond has just as much technology. It’s simply wrapped up in his car, his computer, and his phone. What was once inconceivable is now commonplace. And Maribel did a great job of laying that out. Dick Tracy doesn’t need a watch, and Maxwell Smart doesn’t need a shoe phone. Mobility has made all of us secret agents.
Mobile by the numbers
How common is this technology? Look at the numbers. China Mobile adds 6.3 subscribers a month. India added 13 million in one month. Nokia sells over a million handsets a day. And there were 4 billion mobile subscribers in the world.
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May 5, 2009
Chris Anderson was first a physicist, then an editor for the Economist. Now he’s the editor of Wired. He also has some interesting hobbies, including a startup based around open source airborne drones. In other words, he’s uniquely qualified to talk about how “free” is transforming the software industry.
Opening up day 2 of the SIIA Software Summit, he presented some exerpts from the forthcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (quite a lot of which is outlined in a series of Wired stories.) Chris was kind enough to give me an uncorrected proof a few weeks ago, and having read that, it’s clear this will be a juggernaut of a book. Free is a disruptive idea resulting from an economy where many of our marginal costs are falling to zero.
There are few places it disrupts more than the software industry, and Chris didn’t mince words with a roomful of industry executives: “The three technologies you guys depend on are becoming too cheap to meter.”
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May 4, 2009
The panel on crowdsourcing support at the SIIA Software Summit had some great discussion on the value of community-based support systems. Moderator Dan Woods of Evolved Media guided panelists Janjay Dholakia of Lithium, Jamie Grenney of Salesforce, Scott Hirsch of Get Satisfaction, and Mark Yolton of SAP Community Network.
Dan Woods kicked things off by talking about “Tom Sawyer wikis” — the notion that you can build a thing and expect someone else to do the work. The right thinking, it seems, is to “ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community.”
Q: How do you attract people to the community?
Mark (SAP):
In the broadest sense you have 90% consumers and 10% contributors. 1% are active. These are people who are helping others, colleagues, customers, and peers. You need something that’s going to attract people.
- In our earliest days this was content you could get nowhere else, from SAP product managers and other subject matter experts, so it was a content publishing system.
- After some time, it became the connections with other people, and the focus shifted to tools for establishing connections.
- Eventually it became a point system for ranking and thanks, which led to competition and then the focus was a reputation management system, both individually and as a company.
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May 4, 2009
Watching Judy Estrin at the SIIA Software Summit.
She thinks we’re taking innovation for granted. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, particularly with the Internet. Breakthroughs like the Internet beget smaller innovations like the web browser; but we’re neglecting disruptive innovation and focusing on incrementals.
In a metrics-driven, measured, KPI-centric world, it’s harder to spawn massive breakthroughs because they’re more speculative and harder to justify with a priori knowledge.
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@acroll
As Maribel and I discussed the slides leading up to her presentation today, I remembered James Bond’s watch in The Spy Who Loved Me. It had a printer in it that spooled out a ribbon of text. This struck me as fascinating: The writers couldn’t have Bond carry a personal communicator, because that would be unrealistic to the 1970s audience. As a result, his cigarette case is a microfilm reader, and his shoebrush is a listening device.
