Dec
30
Time is. Time Was. Time Will Be
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Resolution: whatever we do in 2017, let us not enumerate our actions. “20 new uses for AI”, “Six fastest ways of going broke online”, “9 rules for investment success Digitally”, “3 certain ways of employing the right strategies for…” Enough. ENOUGH!
What follows here will be some things I am tracking that may or may not happen in 2017. This piece will end when I am tired or you are bored. Neither of us is keeping score.
* I am using a keyboard to communicate with you. Why? Since the early 1980s when I had to persuade lawyers to use them (“you mean, like my secretary?”). I have annually forecast the end of the keyboard. It’s stubborn resistance is deplorable, given its slowness and inadequacy as an interface. Will 2017 see at least the beginning of its end?
* Voice is the natural and obvious way to address a machine. We now have really good technology to relate voice documents to text. We can even (Wibbitz) turn text into video. And we have made two decades of progress in annotating documents with rich metadata, telling us what they contain and linking them to other texts in whatever form they have when stored or originated. Yet we still cannot fluently “communicate” with them.
* Yet they are, these texts, gradually getting the ability to communicate with each other. 2017 will see further evidence of self-cross referencing and self-updating environments. These will be essential to a future based on machine learning and machine intelligence. Will 2017 see the beginnings of a greater fluency within knowledge systems, be they business environments, scholarly research or intelligence systems, than exists between the people using them? “Sorry, I can no longer explain to you what we know about that, so perhaps your machine would like to talk to ours and get the full picture?”
* Please can we start inventing words to describe the forms we are using, instead of importing into the virtual world the format hangovers from the past. Book, magazine, newspaper, journal, article. Especially that last one. We need new words for episodes of scholarly communication, for example, that indicate aspects of research reporting: “article” does not cut it where “results” could mean “patent” or “data” or other matter relevant to research outcomes but stored elsewhere, not searchable in the same context etc. And the same confusing, terminological poverty exists everywhere.
* We need more numbers. We have spent the past twenty years trying hard to identify content, sources and authors. Now, in the face of legal sanctions which will only get tighter, we face an urgent need to better identify users. The ability to follow, record and measure online activity, and the value of the individual research trail as a contribution to knowledge, now becomes so great that individuals will be constrained to surrender privacy rights of their own in order to benefit from the data created as a result of others doing so. Or they may even be paid to do so.
* Self-publishing goes further and faster next year. Every publisher will have a system. Much will have been increased in sophistication and many services will be free. Creating documents that automatically join the community of reference and talk to each other in ways that update and restore currency is a predictable outcome, towards which we shall see further progress in 2017.
* “Verticalization” is becoming a key theme. We have seen in 2016 how a number of major information industry players have begun to exit horizontal, multi-market portfolio holdings and try to regroup around vertically-integrated, enterprise-driven corporate structures. More of that in 2017, as content becomes more commoditised and shared more effectively amongst users, and the age of data leads beyond the democratisation of information to the idea that it is not the information that has value that you need to protect as much as the way you treat it and relate it – we should be heralding the Age of Analytics.
* Look to see this reflected in M&A. More divestments of content that does not fit the vertical interest. More acquisition of tools, process systems, data analytics, discovery instruments etc. Once we added value to the information: now we will seek to add value to the process of using it, building client reliance on our ability to outsource whole sections of workflow seamlessly. This changes the dynamics of client relationships in ways that many current information players are wholly unprepared, as yet, to confront.
* Some of the old sayings learnt and rehearsed in the past 25 years of mass online usage remain valid. “Nothing succeeds in the network until it has first failed in the network” (think about current commentary on Blockchain). “Change is infinitely and often imperceptibly slow… but then goes with a rush at the end” (think about networks and user populations and communities and brands). “Nothing is so funny to the coming generation as the old-fashioned and antediluvian way in which the immediately previous generation organised themselves in the virtual world” (think about My Space and Facebook, and then Facebook and…)
How many was that? No, do NOT count them. If you have reached this point please accept the profound good wishes of this writer for a peaceful, productive and overwhelmingly happy new year. And if you didn’t? Well, the interstices between wisdom and idiocy are wafer-thin, and we shall never know whether you will have been wiser for not reading it than I have been by virtue of writing it!
Nov
16
NOAH: The Value in Sliced Salami
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It has been a strange autumn, from Brexit to Trump, but some continuing strands of human activity give re-assurance that even if the inmates have taken over the asylum, and just about everything else as well, at least some eternal verities remain in place. Arising from a sickbed that had forced me to miss the Charleston librarian’s conference I fumbled my way into the 10th annual NOAH show, anxious to be re-assured on exactly this point. Indeed, I wanted NOAH to rescue me from the Flood!
For those not dutifully attending the Old Billingsgate jamboree during this decade, NOAH, owned and run by the eponymous advisory team, is the premier presentational market for internet start-ups seeking funding or next-stage re-funding. Now joined by a spring offshoot in Berlin, the London show attracts some 2000 financiers who get to hear 10 minute pitches from a different company every 10 minutes for two days from three different stages – and some get to return the favour with pitches for their own funding services. The range is complete – from the impossible to the improbable to tomorrow’s success stories. All you have to do is pick a winner!
Companies are loosely categorised, with presentations in lead generation (still!), marketplaces and classifieds, travel, infrastructure, gaming, The sharing economy, social and dating, travel, logistics, security, finance and insurance, eCommerce, business services, fintech and medtech, to name the more obvious ones. The vast majority of the presentations are around a web services-based world and very many of them reflect the value definitions that we first created in the mid 1990s. These were all about personal productivity and convenience and cost-saving, and whether we could get merchandisers to pay for the value added to the user experience. So, in the context of some of the best presentations that I personally saw, I am perfectly prepared to believe that the German service Casa can help me buy furniture cost-effectively through combining the inventories of over 100 different furniture stores including Ikea, but if I have already made a brand decision then the value becomes a pricing or re-assurance check. Similarly, many will want to use Spottster to ensure that items on their wish lists have not been re-priced and thus brought within range, but the value added requires a determination in the dedicated shopper that only exists in dedicated minorities of populations. We are salami-slicing the value we offer end-users of all types and the result, if we are not careful, will be further marginalisation as markets inevitably consolidate. Increasingly many new service offerings look like add-ons which major players will either hoover up or re-invent in the passage of time. Picking those winners gets that much tougher, which of course raises the importance of NOAH.
And also gives rise to thoughts about where these innovations are going. The commentary online, for example, about AWS as a backward-looking innovation is important. I am not much concerned about whether the plan that Jeff Bezos approved in 2006 was the press release for cloud-based storage, but I am interested in a revival of thinking around value points that leads to the creation of a facilitation that users can then engage with and develop as they will, creating a user drive from an initial value experiment. The user-centricity is the key thing, like the empty chair at every Bezos meeting. So much of the initial web service value was created around this sort of thinking that I wonder why it has not become more important rather than less over time. It is still possible, in certain geographies, to create good service values modelled on things which have succeeded elsewhere – for me, the classic example was the charming food site, Farmy.ch, at NOAH, – but it is really hard to get these things to scale and they tend to be limited by local market conditions.
My prediction therefore would be that shows like NOAH will become much more broadly based in their conception of online innovation. In future years we shall see much more Internet service based development, with blockchain being an immediate focus. Invaluable as the Web may be, adding fresh value gets tougher all the time. Invention should be looking again at the one-to-one and one-to-many possibilities created by global networking; in a future which may well be Web-based but which is not only Web-based, and where the Web may be the service facilitation but not necessarily the service itself. NOAH remains the barometer of these changes, and as I left I could hear the cheerful laughter of investment bankers tinkling into the music of cash registers. How unlike the world outside that day!
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