May

8

Fiddling with your Devices

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, eBook, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, privacy, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

In our shuffling ascending spiral motion up the great Tower of Time, we do denial at every turn of the stair. A year ago: “Devices are just display tech and will never replace real multi-functional office computing”. Today: “Everything goes to the Cloud”. Last year: “Everybody must build all the functionality into Apps”. Now: “Personalization will overtake Apps before Apps take over publishing”. The result is familiar. Let me see if I can deepen the gloom and make the waters more muddy for a moment, knowing that our only hope of insight comes from bafflement and obscurity.

It seems to me for a start that publishers really do not like Apps. They are convenient, developers love them, they work at the subscription level, but as information products they are not very satisfying. Many of them lack the linkability which has now become a habit of mind for network users. They are certainly Workflow, and invaluable if you are buying a train ticket or booking an hotel. Elsewhere they are often Shortcuts to Nowhere. The statistics tell us that the vast majority of App downloads are never used twice. Since they are tied to devices and the formatting demanded by device manufacturers they do not meet the expectation that we encouraged the former print world to accept: go digital neutral and cover every channel of distribution. They work well for community and clubs, where they can act as a holding point for shared content and a jumping off point for discussion, but I am becoming so unsure of the hegemony of Devices that it is undermining my faith in Apps as well.

The last straw was a note on Pebble in the Guardian (8 May 2012). Pebble is a wristwatch lookalike device based on eInk and providing email and text access on Android and iPhone. (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/12/pebble-e-ink-smartwatch). This really hurts. I have been going round for years telling everyone that the reason my children do not seem to wear watches is that they are people of a modern age who work (albeit late) on network time. But despite the founders of Pebble raising £5 million in funding through product pre-purchases, this only convinces me even more that we are wrong if we start “publishing to” devices as if they were a platform or a channel. I think that our efforts need to be directed elsewhere, while we watch devices morph into new forms and bifurcate across functions. The day will come when we shall each have several (I have unfortunately already arrived) and they will be dedicated to use purposes in our lives – this for flying, that for taking to meetings, this other for holidays etc. The device spec will be governed by our purposes and requirements in these functions, not by any attempt to put every function into every device. The device in the car will have different requirements from the one in the kitchen, though of course some of the functionality will be the same.

All of which rather begs the question of what environments we should be publishing for if not specifically for Apps and devices. And the answer, of course, is the personalized Cloud. The environments we should be watching are Apple’s iCloud, and Amazon (AWS)’s CloudSearch. In this sense, current battles in the book sector are simply a kindergarten warm-up for the big battles out in the playground at lunch hour. Current popular neurosis about privacy (an odd but real phenomenon, since the security services have always had unfettered access to our deepest secrets, at least since Sir Francis Walsingham bought his first thumb screw) and the business drive to Cloud computing will come together in Personal Cloud. There I will have my library, my searchable subscriptions and, above all things, my Cloud Server. This will end all questions about the Web as a service venue – it will become a place for browse and research, not a full service zone. That I will control for myself, as well as all the data derived from it, and on that server I will decide what access to content derived from me and my activities that I give to third parties (using long available services like Paoga – www.paoga.com – to do this). The device that measures my blood pressure files the results in my Cloud, gives me well-informed medical guidance from the selection of service vendors that I trust and subscribe to, but only releases my actual results to my physician at regular periodicity – and his monitoring devices tell him when we need to talk. Come to think of it, the Pebble strapped round my wrist could handle the pulse for a start!

I have too little space here to demonstrate the full extent of my ignorance more than superficially. My feeling from reading is that Amazon’s announcements last month now put them a little in the lead over Apple and Google (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/04/amazon-beats-google-to-a-cloud.php). Apple’s concern was content sharing across devices (https//www.apple.com/uk/iCloud). Googles of course was search, but clearly both Amazon and Google are alike in the vastness of their server farm environments and their ability to support global personal and corporate Cloud usage. And Amazon, having started AWS in 2006, may be said to have the experience, and the readiness to move into these new worlds. We are entering the age of “he is so old he can remember when Amazon was a bookseller”. An annual rental of CloudSearch costs 100 USD.

So has my once upon a time dream of the consolidated omni device completely faded? Probably so, though we are likely to be bewildered by the range of device offerings and their narrow differentiation for many years to come. Meanwhile, the next virtual world builds quietly in the Cloud, and demands our total attention.

Apr

27

Open Up Your APIs!

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments

In this industry five years is enough to benchmark fundamental change. This week I have been at the 9th Publishers’ Forum, organized as always by Klopotek, in Berlin. This has become, for me, a must attend event, largely because while the German information industry is one of the largest in Europe, German players have been marked by a conservative attitude to change, and a cautious approach to what their US and UK colleagues would now call the business model laws of the networked information economy. At some level this connects to a deep German cultural love affair with the book as an object, and how could that not be so in the land that produced Gutenburg? On another level, it demonstrates that German business needs an overwhelming business case justification to institute change, and that it takes a time for these proofs to become available. Which is not to say that German businesses in this sector have not been inventive. An excellent two part case study run jointly by Klopotek and de Gruyter was typical: de Gruyter are the most transformed player in the STM sector because they have seized upon distribution in the network and selling global access as a fast growth path, and Klopotek were able to supply the necessary eCommerce  and back office attributes to make this ambition feasible. And above all, in a room of more than 300 newspaper, magazine and book executives, we were at last able to fully exploit the language and practice of the network in information handling terms. This dialogue would have been impossible in Germany five years ago. A huge attitudinal change has taken place. Now we can deploy our APIs and allow users to get the value and richness of our content, contextualised to their needs, instead of covering them with the stuff and hoping they get something they want.

In some ways the Day 2 Keynote from Andrew Jordan, CTO at Thomson Reuters GRU business, exemplified the extent of this. The incomparable Brian O’Leary had started us off on Day 1 in good guru-ish style by placing context in its proper role and reminding us that it is not content as such but its relationships that increasingly concern us. You could not listen to him and still believe that content was the living purpose of the industry, or that the word “publishing” had not changed meaning entirely. With Michael Healy of CCC and  Peter Clifton of +Strategy following him to hammer home the new world of collaboration and licencing, and the increasing importance of metadata in order to identify and describe tradeable entities, we were well on the way towards a recognition of new realities, ferried there before dinner by Jim Stock of MarkLogic using the connected content requirements of BBC Sport in an Olympic year to get us started in earnest on semantic approaches to discovery and our urgent needs to create appropriate platform environments to allow us to use our content fluently in this context.

So the ground was well-prepared for Andrew Porter. He took us on a journey from the acquisition of ClearForest by Reuters while it was being acquired by Thomson, to the use of this software by the new company to create OpenCalais, allowing third parties (over 60 of them) to get into entity extraction (events and facts, essentially) and then into the creation of complex cross-referencing environments, and finally to the use of this technology by Thomson Reuters themselves in the OneCalais and ContentMarketplace environments. So here was living proof of the O’Leary thesis, on a vast scale, building business-orientated ontologies, and employing social tagging in a business context. Dragging together the whole data assets of a huge player to service the next customer set or market gap. And no longer feeling obliged to wrap all of this in a single instance database, but searching across separately-held corporate datasets in a federated manner using metadata to find and cross-reference entities or perform disambiguation mapping. Daniel Mayer of Temis was able to drive this further and provide a wide range and scale of cases from a technology provider of note. The case was made – whether or not what we are now doing is publishing or not, it is fundamentally changed once we realize that what we know about what we know is as important as our underlying knowledge itself.

And of course we also have to adjust our business models and our businesses to these new realities – patient Klopotek have been exercising expertise in enabling that systems re-orientation to take place for many years. And we must recognize that we have not arrived somewhere, but that we are now in perpetual trajectory. One got a real sense of this from an excellent presentation to a very crowded room by Professor Tim Bruysten of richtwert on the impact of social media, and, in another way, from Mike Tamblyn of Kobo when he spoke of the problems of vertical integration in digital media markets. And, in a blog earlier this week, I have already reported on the very considerable impact of Bastiaan Deplieck of Tenforce.

Speaking personally, I have never before attended a conference of this impact in Germany. Mix up everything in the cocktail shaker of Frank Gehry’s great Axica conference centre alongside the Brandenburg Gate, with traditional book publishers rubbing shoulders with major information players, and chatting to software gurus, industry savants, newspaper and magazine companies, enterprize software giants and business service providers and you create a powerful brew in a small group. Put them through seperate German and English streams, then mix them up in Executive Lounge seminars and discussion Summits and the inventive organizers give everyone a chance to speak and to talk back. This meeting had real energy and, for those who look for it, an indication that the changes wrought by the networked economy and its needs in information/publishing terms, now burn brightly in the heart of Europe.

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