Nov
10
Watching the Future Take Flight
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Search, social media, STM | Leave a Comment
Lets start with the Flight. At the end of last week came that rare luxury and respite – the NOAH show! For two whole days, since 2009, the investment community have been able to lounge in Old Billingsgate and make up their minds about what is likely, what is imminent and what wont happen in eCommerce and Internet services. On three stages and in front of some 600 investment outfits, over 500 early growth players say “its me you were really looking for”. The cases, the comparitive performance, and the real knowledge on display is hugely heartening. Something tells me that London as the start-up centre of Europe is now a bit off the top of the curve. NOAH advisors, who run this show, have opened a Berlin show and intend one as well for Tel Aviv next year, and if I were them then I would also be looking at Barcelona when the current crisis subsides. But location is not the most important thing here. Innovation in services cultures in a networked society goes viral – and comes out of a global market to start with, as the Dallas, Texas, based founder of Bumble demonstrated as she appeared on stage with her Russian tech partner, Badoo. They were interviewed by the founding partner of NOAH, and its Master of Ceremonies, Marco Rodzynek, in a session. That reminded me that behind the apparent strength of seemingly impregnable network market leadership like Facebook there always looms a lither, smarter competitor who grows very quickly, and who must be emulated or acquired if seemingly impregnable positions are to be maintained.
Then if you waited till the end of Marco’s Show you got to fly. Featured there were Volocopter and Lillium, a full week before NASA and Uber announced their deal, adverting the glories of investing in autonomous air taxis. Lillium, a vertical take off jet solution, can land on a tennis court and can take you 300 km at 300 km per hour. Volcopter, as its name suggests, is driven by a ring of small rotors, is also battery driven but shorter in range. Both are German, both do huge information-based navigation work, and Lillium has been extensively experimented with in urban conditions in Dubai. Although they were a surprizing find in this context, for those of us who lead a screen based existence, they were a welcome reminder of the real world significance of all the data crunching going on around us. And as I rode home comfortably on German owned Chiltern Railways, I reflected on leaders in my country prepared to invest $75 billion on a new railway line, not yet begun, which will, when it opens in 2033, clip a life and job saving 22 minutes off the train schedule between London and Birmingham. Mercifully I shall not be here to see it – I shall be in the air taxi!
Another visionary with a loaded gun full of ideas at NOAH was Ali Parsa, the founder of Babylon healthcare. Within days of the show he had announced another big leap forward in supporting Britain’s overworked healthcare system with voice and video medical practice extensions, allowing computer supported diagnostics for those who cannot or need not get a consultation in person. as this gets better and better, and has more intelligent systems support, it offers the only real hope we have of getting the NHS back on track as a national free-at-the-point-of-use system. And as the network gets better the diagnostic session will improve, and the analytics will deliver more insight. Listening computers will be able to prompt the doctor with more questions, and produce a range of answers and probabilities, and a treatment schedule for the doctor to consider and turn into prescriptions, patient notes and records for the regular GP. By using this for minor ailments the system may survive – if we do not use it outside of London then it certainly won’t, but it does point again, in a tiny country like Britain, towards a need for equality in what is rapidly becoming a human rights issue – access at home to superfast broadband. We should be giving every citizen regardless of where they live at least 40 megabits of upload and download. The fact that we are not (yet the South Koreans are) was graphically demonstrated by the village in Devon who, on 5th November, the traditional Bonfire Night , burnt in effigy not Guy Fawkes, but a British Telecom Superfast Broadband van. Not much diagnostics down there, then, and not even a high speed train in 15 years time to take them to the next NHS bottleneck much quicker. The future is here, as William Gibson so wisely said, but its not very evenly spread.
Much more to say about journals and funders and scholarly communication next week. After the Great Debate at the Stationers company this week, we all decided that regulation under Brexit was only going to get worse, and as we thought of data regulation and copyright we felt better off where we were than where we might be going. And I am chairing the session on “whose Research is it Anyway” at London Information International on December 5-6. More warming than mulled wine, I assure you!
Oct
20
ZKM – the cure for Frankfurt
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM | Leave a Comment
So, my fiftieth Frankfurt came and went. Three days of intense and interesting discussion with people who are building very successful businesses from the technologies and the social change in a networked society which I have been studying and monitoring since the 1980s. Much of this is hugely encouraging, some is faintly irritating (I still get questions about what happens when print re-asserts itself, or when will innovation be over!). But all of it, nine meetings a day, the receptions, and chairing the Innovation Day opening session, is, frankly – tiring! By Friday I needed a break.
And that duly came, though in the most surprizing manner. On Saturday I journied out of Frankfurt and down the Rhine valley to the comparatively (in German terms) “new town” of Karlsuhe. I wanted to revisit FIZ Karlsruhe, a part of the Leibniz Institute of Information Infrastructure, which is based some 12 km north of the site on the campus of KIT, the great technical university. That visit, on the following Monday, was all I had hoped it to be, and a testimony to the powerful work of these part (25%) state funded institutions in Germany. But more of that in its own context, having travelled through Boston the previous week, and experienced a grand party to celebrate the 50 years stuff with some 100 friends (enough of that now that we are in year 51!) I was pooped. My only interest was a delightful book on the history of sixteenth century Albania and I was quite prepared to embrace that for the weekend had not Karlsruhe itself intervened.
As I said, it is a new town. Started in 1715 as the Margrave of Baden sought to distance himself from the unruly citizens of Durlach. He built a monumental castle, and from his front door planned city streets running out from that central point in a great fan shape – its nickname is the fan shaped city. Thomas Jefferson, visiting at the other end of the same century, was impressed and its structure finds echoes in L’Enfant’s Washington. I was impressed too, and despite the disruption of installing a metro system, this remains a civilized and relaxed place. Go to Grundrechte square and you can see the civil liberties enjoyed by Germans emblazoned on street signs – this is the home of the German Federal Supreme and Constitutional Courts. The fact that this is a university town gives a pleasant diversity. By the time I reached the doors of the ZKM I was beginning to revive, but I had no idea of what I was to encounter next.
Imagine a huge munitions factory, stripped and turned vast three story galleries that reminded me of the central space at Tate Modern – only much longer. Then fill that with a wholly mixed population of all ages and abilities united in one pursuit – finding art and enjoyment in immersion in digital media. Walk into a room where cameras pick you up and show you on a screen. I paused before the slightly alarming image before me, when all of a sudden I was joined on screen by the people who had passed through earlier, all crowding and laughing and strolling around my similarly moving image. Then turn to a scanner which wants to look at objects in your pockets, and then similarly mixes them on screen with the images from other pockets. Very simple stuff, this, but it drove the laughter and delight of the visitors as they went to other galleries, brought their own devices into play and felt the power of the most perfectly designed and produced art gallery for digital as art that I have yet seen. ZKM is Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, and is an example to us all of the artistic and educational value of digital art. Gloomy reporters who ask what can be done to prevent children from spending too much time on their devices should be sent here for retraining. The networks provide digital opportunity for multimedia and individual media expression and social art of a high order. This has to be better acknowledged than it is in conventional media exchanges, and here is a wonderful example of how to do it.
And learn from it. As I wandered through the elements of a major show called Hydrid Layers I was struck, involved and then compelled to watch a deck called Basilisk, a video performance by an American artist called Daniel Keller. Using two ideas – the Streisand Effect, which occurred when the actor’s lawyers forced the removal from the Web of an image only previously seen by ten people, thus exciting the curiosity of millions, and the Basilisk concept, from the ancient world via Harry Potter, where the threat can only be extinguished by holding up a mirror, he explores the 2016 US election. With Google Maps shots of Streisand’s former Malibu home being undermined by coastal erosion as a backdrop, Keller uses flat and unemotional language to explain the US Alt-right memes around Pepe the frog, the frog pharaoh, and the Cult of Kek, and how this symbolism and its cartoon imagery became important in the attack on Clinton and the election of Trump. And, if we are ever to hold the Mirror up to the Basilisk, these are things about a networked society that we must learn and understand. Indeed, unless we have museums and galleries like this it is very hard to see how we can, at any age, learn and understand.
I left ZKM with the same sore feet that I had brought down from Frankfurt. Perhaps slightly worse. But I was elated and refreshed by what I had seen. If the Hydrid Layers or Art of Immersion shows come to a place near you please rush to see them. The only way to stop our kids falling for the Kek Effect is to immerse them so thoroughly in digital art and society that they have the ability to fashion their own mirrors to expose to the face of ever-present Basilisks.
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