Jun
20
From Utility to Futility?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Ever since I wrote a piece in February called the Point of Utility (https://www.davidworlock.com/2012/02/the-point-of-utility/) I have been plagued and victimized by my own invention. I thought, as we all do, that I would invent something clever by way of a yardstick or a definition, and then my name would be made for all time – “Utility? Anything to do with Worlock’s Law on the Point of Utility?” and more in that vein. Instead, I have created a definition that I now see manifesting itself everywhere I look, almost as if I cannot look out upon the world except through Utility – coloured spectacles. My original definition suggested that network intensity and commercial inventiveness would concentrate and proliferate at points where the network application cut corners in real world workflow and enabled you to be more productive on the network – mobile and internet – than you were in non-virtual life (Yes, I really was that inventive!) and that these points of utility would be the take-off points for new network service growth.
Don’t try this at home, and heed my warnings. Having invented my definition I now see it everywhere. In fact, I see nothing else. As an example, look at route planning. Sat Nav is the old world of maps made digital, slowly adding value through associated events (where can we stop for lunch? etc). And all roads have the same value, since from the map, or even Google earth, it is hard to tell those things which only other users of those roads could tell you. My friend who runs Elgin, the database of UK roadworks could add a bit, and his service is vital to a composite view of travel. But you, my friend, can tell me about the tree branch that blew over the road, or the fact that you cannot turn right at the end any longer, or that this is a far quicker route across town than the signposted one. So the point of utility is reached when our GPS is on and mapping every road for us, and we ourselves provide user-generated advice for others. Point of Utility Bingo! Please turn now to www.waze.com and start mapping a street near you, and when you reach your destination turn to https://Path.com to share these experiences socially. See what I mean?
So I have stopped looking, for a moment, to the endless roll-call of utility points which is Salesforce (and Jive and Yammer), though I was delighted to note Docusign (www.docusign.com) – at last, a real point of utility around document signatures that does not involve 30 minutes of scanning and attaching. Instead I have decided to look in places where the workflow is as alien to me as the service values – shopping, designing household products, decorating. Many people will testify to my inadequacies here. And I started out on the task of finding things just because of the rapid decline in local newspaper and directory classifieds. There is a beta called www.Zaarly.com which is interesting in this regard, and I also looked at www.taskrabbit.com and the optimistic attempt at www.FiveRR.com to persuade us that we can still buy something meaningful in terms of tasks that people will do for a fiver – £ or $. Here is a massive onward search for localized points of utility which can be used in the local context to create service values which will, in turn, replace and upgrade some aspects of what the newspaper and yellow pages once meant to us. I would say that, from this sample, the work is ongoing, but once several aspects of utility emerge by trial and error, we shall have the virtual utility we seek to replace the lesser print usefulness which we have now lost.
Much the same could be written about the world’s 190,000 health information services. Sometimes, however, you just need to speak or video skype a doctor. In the UK we have a long history of this, now replete with NHS services designed not for the utility of the patient but to relieve an overloaded health system. In the US they order things differently, so I was pleased to see www.ZocDoc.com and www.teladoc.com emerging. ZocDoc (backed by Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs), is a system for locating and making quick appointments. Doctors pay $250 to join, patients get the app free, and use the service to get into gaps/cancellations in the physicians schedule. Works best with a paid-for medical service I would say, but it demonstrates that the point of real utility can be on the service side of the equation as well as the user side.
Then came the shopping. I was impressed by www.onekingslane.com but it was a bit too much like a discount departmental store for me to find utility beyond catalogue. But when you engage buyers at a different point – as www.zazzle.co.uk does when it enables me to run through the whole ghastly choice of customizable items for the home. Point of utility – all types of customization in one place, and no sniggers and public denigration when I customized an apron with “Dave and ‘Beks Country Suppers Served Here”. Then look at www.etsy.com, and get into design at www.fab.de. The point is not to emulate shopping but to extend it in ways that would be hard in a shop.
One final note. When I wrote here about 3D printing I was told that I would not see real applications in my lifetime. So go to www.shapeways.com and have a look at ways you can make your own designs and print them through additive manufacturing. OK, its keyrings and things, but this is a visible tip of what will eventually emerge as the new manufacturing mountain. And when you can print it for yourself on a small $200 gizmo (now available in prototype) the point of utility will have landed in your own front room: “I designed what I wanted, downloded it from the design site , and printed it in my own front room!” Bet they still don’t call it Worlock’s Law, though.
Jun
13
A Stroll down Utopia Road
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
In the cold, wet and dark of an English summer it can be hard to remember that elsewhere matters digital are progressing at breakneck speed. In these circumstances spending last week in the US and getting sundry updates from European colleagues was like a punch on the nose. Everything and everyone is getting cleverer, and everything that was once the standard and the value point is now commoditized. Even the poor old science journal, protected treasure of countless publishers , can now be launched out of a box, by any university, research team or laboratory with an internet connection (http://www.scholasticahq.com/). The commoditized article, meanwhile, realizes new potential if you envisage it not as the final outcome of the science process, but as an interface itself to a deeper understanding of the knowledge pathway.
If I had doubted this then I had a rude shock when looking at what Jan Velterop and his colleagues have been up to at Utopia Docs (http://utopiadocs.com/media/introduction/). In its first manifestations this company was about getting more linkage and metadata value from science articles, and I wrote about it under the heading “I Can See So Clearly Now” (https://www.davidworlock.com/?p=903) in October 2011. Then I tucked it into the semantic publishing cubbyhole, until warned by one of Jan’s colleagues that I was in danger of not seeing very clearly now at all. And he was right. Utopia Docs 2.0 is worth consideration by anyone as an operational interface for lab research users. Different to but just as valid as Mendeley, and indeed incorporating information from that service as it shows users the relationships an article may have – from Altmetric as well as Mendeley, from Cross-Ref as well as Sherpa/RoMEO (best recommendation for Open Access – use this to move from article to article, opening each one without recourse to a source site or permissions form or subscription barrier/validation.) But the real joy is in the way it handles figures, graphs and chemical structures: if all of this referencing, rotation, reconstituting can be done with figures, then connecting in complex datasets should be easy as well. Add some “social” – bookmarks and comments from other readers/users – and some searchable aids like Wikipedia cross references and lab products directories, and then you can see the huge distance travelled from beta. As we all now contemplate the science desktop and the service interfaces which will dominate it, here is a another real contender.
It seems to me that science and technology are now moving rapidly down this knowledge handling and referencing track. Yet everything done here is fully applicable to B2B in general, and that just because “publishing” was different in these narrow segments, there is no reason why information services should be different at all. Looking at Innovadex (www.innovadex.com) this week, I realised that there are now very few business, industrial or scientific sectors without full service vertical search, hugely well attuned to definable client requirements, with service values attached to front and back end. We all still use Google/Bing et al, but when we have heavy duty knowledge-based work to do, there is usually a specialised can-opener to hand now ready to do the job. And these will begin to coalesce with content as the continuing consolidation of our industry takes place. Step up this week’s consolidation case study: IHS and GlobalSpec.
As one who has long carried a torch for GlobalSpec (www.globalspec.com), I want to congratulate Jeff Killeen and his team on an outstanding job, and Warburg Pincus, who have backed this company since 1996 , for extraordinary foresight and resolve en route to this $136m reward. As someone who knew IHS when they had BRS Search and the biggest and most unwieldy filing cabinet in engineering history, I also want to offer recognition credits to the buyer. This really is a winning solution, in the sense that both of these services together now comprise the complete engineering workflow; that over 10 million design briefs and specifications, and some 50k supplier catalogues, 70 e-newsletters, 15 online shows and 7 million registered users all provide a huge barrier to entry in this sector; that the barrier is as great in terms of the sector vendors as well as sector buyers; and that none of this was based on technology unique to engineering, but on the tools and analytics that are available to all of us in every segment. And it all took 16 years to mature. And it worked because the difference between the winner and a number of losers was simple: the winners understood better than their competitors how engineers worked, how they communicated and how they solved problems and behaved.
And just time for a footnote along these themes. I was fascinated to see the merger of Yippy Inc (www.yippy.com) with MuseGlobal this week. I have known Muse for many years and admired their advocacy of Cloud-based solutions and their patient pursuit of data virtualization solutions at a time when it was only the spooks and the internal security people who were interested. Yippy, formerly Clusty, has a licence from the Vivismo patent (recently bought by IBM, who own 10% of the new company) for the data clustering vehicle, Velocity. So we are in Data-as-a-Service as well as SaaS country here. And here we locate the other trend line which we must watch with care. In this note we have seen user-based solutions bringing public and private content into intense analytical focus on the desktop; we have seen industrial scale vertical search and content alignment resolve workflow issues for professionals; and here we have data solutions which enable major corporates and institutions to impose their own private order on information and intelligence regardless of source. All of these will deploy in all markets at the same time. The clever game will be second-guessing which prevail in which verticals and in what horizontals of organizational size over what time periods.
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