May

4

A Stroll in the Tiergarten

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

It was almost May. The asparagus is just arriving and the rhubarb at its best. This can only be the backdrop for the annual Publishers Forum in Berlin, now celebrating its 12th year and consistently performing as the focus for publishing discussion in central Europe, and celebrating the global view Europeans now take of publishing in all its forms and marketplaces. This show is put on by Klopotek for the industry it serves, which is a service that its industry should appreciate With some 260 delegates from Germany and central Europe, that appreciation certainly seems to be in place. This year’s theme “How to Reconstruct Publishing: Competing Visions, Channels and Audiences”, was the first under the direction of Dr Ruediger Wischenbart, but was as typically challenging as ever. A real debate about where we are going is still hard to find.

In a typically stirring piece in Scholarly Kitchen this week Joe Esposito (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/04/the-half-life-of-print/) made the point that whenever we debate the future of publishing someone stands up and asks about the future of the book. I agree with him, and I find this as annoying and pointless as he does. Quite apart from the fact that print has disappeared in very many contexts in society, the digitally networked world releases us from this fruitless debate by the promise of being able to deliver anything to anyone at the point of use in their preferred medium. Ergo, print will survive where people value it and disapear entirely where they do not – yellow pages, trade maggazines, academic journals, newspapers…? Well, you see what I mean. Joe makes the point that digital publishing has not yet been kind to coffee table artbooks, so I was interested to hear Rolf Grisebach, CEO at Thames and Hudson, give one of the opening keynotes in Berlin.

His not-unreasonable argument turned on the large file size and lack of a decisive advantage in image viewing that digital currently offers users of art books. In last weeks’ piece in this place I pointed to the virtual reality benefits of displaying architecture online, as practiced by the New York Times. I would like art publishing that allowed me to focus on the eyes of the artist and then move me through a slide show of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in chronological order. I would like a virtual reality tour of Christopher Wren. I have the Waste Land app on my iPad and I am a customer for new approaches to valuing art, literature, architecture and music in a digital age. Here I think we can do more, though I was very grateful to Rolf for re-awakening memories of his company founder, Walter Neurath, and for reminding me that the company is named for its two founding cities, London and New York.

In some ways there was more comfort for the progressives in the next keynote, from Jacob Dalborg, the CEO of Bonnier Books. Here was an integrated vision which sounded like an investible business plan on the one hand, while stressing the way the digital world makes marketing to niches more potentially profitable than ever before. Any session that hammers home the need to build and exploit metadata and expand metadata values must be of prime importance today. With global standard expertise on the agenda (Graham Bell, Director of Editeur) this conference could hardly be accused of ducking the issue, but I still feel that we see this as “marketing utilities” and it always gets sidelined when we talk “creativity”. Well, if you want to create markets there is no more important subject, and it was good to see Jacob Dalborg underlining it.

This conference does bilingual brilliantly, but it also does breakout sessions that create wonderful debate but mean I lose some agenda items. Thus I really wanted to hear Publishing goes Pop: instead I moderated a session with a small group in which a very valuable discussion took place. Across the table was an Open Access STM publisher from Poland and a consumer publishing marketing executive from Germany. The others at the table were left to listen as these two set out to demonstrate the parallels in their very different specialities and effectively draw together the themes of the conference. This was the antidote to any idea that publishing is pulling apart. Indeed, at the end of this I was convinced that the digital network is helping publishing of all types re-focus on the user, and services to the user, in a way that in the world of physically formatted publishing we could only pay lip service.

And of course we had some technology, but it is now noticeable that we do not talk “tech” to these audiences at all. Matt Turner, CTO at MarkLogic, talks about flexibility, about speed of new product generation, and, in this agenda, putting content and context into action. It remains a surprize to many of us that publishers seem to set so much value on creative content, understandably, while according such reduced value to the contextual data about customers and how they use content in general, and their own content in particular. Meanwhile, Steve Odart of IXXUS moved us into a consideration of how we run our businesses and how we innovate when he took the Agile project management philosophy away from tech and into business as a way of working creatively in digital marketplaces.

Two days and we did not even get a stroll in the park – though perhaps that was what we enjoyed in the sort of company which is thinking seriously, not about the book, but about where publishing goes now.

Dec

5

Outsourcing My Brain

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

During this period of enforced convalescence I have had to come to grips with the idea that my brain only works effectively when supported by the memory in all the devices around me. And that this state of dependency is now global. Without our membership of a globally networked society we would become slow and inefficient: with it we become dependent. And it is this dependency which seems to me the first stop on a mental route march which we need to make. I am far from the first to try to examine what Internet of Things (IoT) or, as some will say, Internet of Everything (IoE) will mean for social, industrial or commercial aspects of society. But I do not yet hear much examination of this phenomena in terms of the information industry, let alone the businesses we insist on still calling “publishing” or the “media”.

Let’s start at a point of common agreement. We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution. For evidence, check the websites of IEEE or IET: the latter have just published a splendid “Ones to Watch” report (http://www.theiet.org/policy/media/campaigns/ones-to-watch.cfm?utm_source=redirect&utm_medium=any&utm_campaign=onestowatch#.VHt6PmB0imw.mailto).
They see the vanguard industries in this fundamental change in the nature of commerce and society – think what happened in the UK between 1780 and 1830 – as driven by space exploration, robotics. 3D printing (I would rather they had spoken of additive manufacturing), new energy networks, food manufacturing and cyber-security. I buy all of those, but would add drug manufacture driven by individual DNA analysis.

Underlying this social and industrial revolution is the revolution that makes it all possible: the global connectivity of network – attached computing power, and it’s ability to exploit intelligence and data generated in the network. Only this week Professor Steven Hawking has pointed out the dangers of AI outside of man’s control. My feelings run the other way: it amazes me that while we have spoken of machine intelligence for 30 years we have so little to show for it. Only in the past few years has the ability to harvest data more effectively, and the ability to cross- search it without restructuring it, produced real results in terms of the impact of the data analytics advances (“Big Data”) really struck home. While we will always be seduced by thrills and tricks (Google Glasses?), we can now see machine intelligence built into most common workflows and at a variety of levels.

Here is a list, posted by Vincent Granville at DataScienceCentral, of impact areas for data analysis in the next ten years:

(http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/17-areas-to-benefit-from-big-data-analytics-in-next-10-years)

Just look at how many of these impact the information industry marketplace. As our world of work changes so the very survival of information market players will depend upon how easily we are able to track change and react to it. But what part of this struggle to survive can we lay at the door of IoT/IoE? And can we picture an IoT world which is less trivial than sports wearables or more useful than a car that turns on the house lights at home when you are still a mile away? Well, obviously we can, but the unacceptable passengers riding on the back of IoT must then be taken into account. Yes, it does mean that we shall move from the age of privacy into the age of transparency – and we are halfway there already. And, yes, it does mean that employment is going to be very different. We will lose millions of jobs, and we are surprisingly far down this track as well. The UK public sector will lose a further Million jobs in the next five years, we learnt this week. Some of those will be outsourced but governments do not give up governing lightly – and many of those jobs will become automated systems roles in the outsourcing process . And it may well mean that, at last, we have to properly rethink what Capitalism means. After all, a zero marginal production cost society will ask questions about how the profit mechanism works.

For a good review of many of these questions see Sue Halpern’s review article in New York Review of Books (vol. LXI, Number 18, 3December 2014). Cisco famously predicts that all of this adds up to a 14.4 trillion dollar boost to the global economy between now and 2022. The 10 million sensors that measured our world in 2007 will number 100 trillion by 2030. In Rotterdam docks all containers will be engineered for auto drive by 2018. Uber, a precursor of the automated driving world, was as valuable as Time Warner this very month. For better or worse, this world is with us now. This is not 1780 in the original British experience, but 1820 and the railway boom is just beginning. And for information companies of every type there is a corresponding possibility of mega growth, as long as we read change accurately. Wherein lies a problem that I want to address later.

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