[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]

[Note that his basic pitch is that “there are other apps for buying things covered by POs — but we handle all that stuff on your expense-reports”. Non-PO spending is a significant part of the bottom line, and it’s almost all services…]

[Wins points by literally taking off his tie. Then by referring to how conference speakers go on ad nauseaum about the long-tail!]

Opens with a reference to Newton and General Magic. Even reaches back to HP e-Speak (claims $400M on that alone?!). Nice history lesson, but seems to be drifting — and then he brings it home:

Market opportunity? The end of EAs — fewer and fewer executives have assistants!

“Imagine a world in which your flight is delayed, and your hotel and car service are notified, your dinner guests and reservation are updated” — that was, I agree, the universal scenario for all the e-business services pitches.

Larry Ellison is wrong — Silicon Valley is not Detroit, and software innovation hasn’t even begun. [He’s doing a good job of ref’fing to earlier speakers in the morning, but I’m not even sure that the conf attendees rememeber as much!]

Less than 10% of e-Commerce is in services. [His slides are waay too small-font]

We are happy Salesforce customers, but true on-demand is coming in more personalized, presence-oriented, embedded ways. Cuts to a race-car slide of hundreds of service providers you might deal with as a knowledge worker (or consumer).

Some of their customers’ employees spend 2hrs a DAY scheduling services. Their platform (for suppliers) is a global reservation system; coupled with a personal assistant for buyers.

His scenario is an opportunistic sale of Yankees tickets while he’s on a business trip to NY. Rearden’s EBS (Employee Business Services) scenario is a little scary — shows clear r/t class customization of employees (who gets coach, who gets the jet). Calls it a nearly $1/2 T category, ripe for at least a 1% savings. People want to lump us together with Salesforce; we have many more subscribers at admittedly less fees, nearly 1M by end of year. It’s mundane, but it drives a network effect.

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[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]

Introduction – two communities at the front-lines of having to deal with the issues going on in this conference are homeland securty and the military.

Tara Lemmey – What does homeland securty look like in the information age and how do we do it in way that holds privacy and civil liberties together. Strong recommendations on how we change the national security infrastructure. We were very successful in getting executive orders and legislation passed to get this stuff done. “What we’re showing you has been mandated into law”.

The FBI agent in chicago calls in information fron chicago. want to get information into the system as quickly as possible. Speech to text, we then edit it. The technology is simple, but the concepts underlying it are very different. When we first did this project the documents had to go up the chain, wildly redacted before they got anywhere. We recommended a ‘right to share’ document. How do you write a document that handles levels of secrecy as well as on various audit-trails to help people go about what information is trustworthy. Looked to Ebay to check reputation kind of stuff.

We had to explain the publish and subscribe model. Documents go out in a distributed way to subscribers to it. if something really vital was happening it would be quick to escalate it.

Four months later a CIA agent in Kabul gets information about a microbiologist. Right now, those two bits of paper (the one from FBI and this one) might not meet together. Likely that they won’t.

In our fictional world the Joint Terrorism task force gets the information and can read it because he’s subscribed to it – probably about Chicago but might be about bio. Gets related documents pushed to him. he wants to connect the documents. Computers can do fuzzy linking, but you really need humans to make judgments.

The DHS are doing federated network search – watching what people are looking for. When she submits them she can see what’s going on in the activity space – chatter of the network normally at the external stuff. (Presented like Flickr tagspace – very cool). She sees a spike in usage in one particular type of conversation, see’s who the experts are, makes an ad hoc team.

What are the critical points of action, do you have enough information to do something, what do you need to get it.

People send out information to people, asking questions around this kind of stuff. And then sending out information out to the USDA or to state local law enforcement. Trying to increase the signal ta the edge

Producing a case report.

That gets sent upstairs – that’s the end of this part of the representation. 5/10/15,000 instances of this kind of activity happen every day. The FBI is leading in a lot of ways, because their old system was failing and they had to reconceive it.

The big issues are looking at the cultural issues. having a positive effect on policy, but culture is the hardest bit. what do distributed organisations look like culturally and how do you encourage positive behaviour. Also who are you recruiting and what does this look for going on in the future.

Also greater privacy challenges arising out of this stuff.

= Meeting the challenges of a new competitive landscape =

= Navy Commander Greg Glaros, Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation =

Find a direct way of getting to the defence department. ‘because our business model wasn’t working’

new concepts of operations.

This is the world through the lens in which we see it – globalisation II – containment strategies. New rules – globalisation III — are about connectedness. Security = Defense + All Else. From industrial age to information age.

(http://www.google.com/search?q=globalization-ii+globalization-iii )

Finding ourselves – the people today in Iraq will be the statesmen of the next generation, because they’re seeing how things work now.

Old way: shouting at each other on battlefields against known opponents. (low liklihood, low vulnerability – preserve advantags in force

prefers Iraq to washignton as you knwo who’s shooting at you

low vulnerability high iklihood – insurgents in Iraq – intelligence needed – how do you out-adapt enemy

High vulnerability and liklihood – catstrophic – 9/11 – deflect ultra terrorism

high likelihood low vuln: disruptive – cyber attacks avoid trategic surprise.

3 blocks war – complex, distributed, adaptive

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[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, me et al. EAOE.]

Connecting Worlds – a collaborative approach to innovation in self-managing technology. Autonomic computing is about tackling complexity in the IT environment. Everything we do relies on a manageable flexible infrastructure. Without it, nothing works. Fundamental.

The word autonomic comes from the autonomic nervous system – like your pupils dilating when it gets dark.

Have to develop technologies but also an ecosystem to support this stuff. What’s needed is an ecosystem of participating vendors and technologists that can fit together in a modular way.

(GLIAC has a strong committment to research – over 3000 patents. Over 500 patents are on autonomic patents. From having intellectual property, you can then open it up to the public sphere – they’ve contributed 120+ collaborative projects into the Open Source community. Embraced Linux. Also put together a venture capital team that goes out and puts together partnerships – 750 relationships with venture capital backed companies. reaching out to find a community to collaborate with. Also collaborating with 1000s of innovative companies.)

“We now face a problem sprinigng from the very core of our success in th IT industry… More than any other IT problem, this one – if it remains unsolved – will actually prevent us from moving to the next era of computing… The obstacle is complexity. Dealing with it is the single most important challenge facing the IT industry”

80% of money in organistaions around IT is spent on maintenance. Therefore on 20% can be spend on new stuff.

Most orgs have lots of systems inteconnecting. Also that means a whole range of different job roles. The way that people approiach technology today is orthogonal to the way it needs to be delivered – the user sees a simple process completely distinct from the job roles / sections and componentised tech structures.

Many people think that Autonomic Computing will allow machine sto take over all management tasks (ROBOCOP PICTURE / JOKE ABOUT ARNIE). Isn’t about getting rid of people, but producing a blanace between what people do and what technology does – technology not living up to its side fo the bargain – people forced to do things in time-consuming, tedious and error prone ways.

Characteristics of the solution:

– end to end modular reference architectural concept

– self-managing autonomic technology in all components

– common componentry

– virtualised resources

– federated configuration management data

– unifying standards

– process automation (workflow / portal technologies)

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[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, and me. EAOE.]

How many comparative literature majors were in the audience? Five – she wins the bet.

Other quick questions, to ensure we are all on the same page.

Does technology free you? Or enslave you?

In 1997 I coined the phrase continuous partial attention. With continuous patial attention we keep the top item at the top and then monitor everything else.

cpa is motivated by the desire not to miss opportunities

We feel alive when connected to others. To be busy and to be connected is to feel important

In close to two decades it’s been important to maximise connections, to network, to maximise technology. Speed, agility and connectivity are very important. Need to nework and always-on lifestyle means we are overstimulated and underfulfilled?

do you cherish technology-free moments now and then?

Email free fridays has emerged. We are email junkies – 1 billion sent a day. Great new way to do business but also a headache. Nestle-Rowntree has introduced the idea of email-free Fridays. It’s been banned in the co. to see if employees are more creative with face-to-face meetings.

Email can defer decisions.

CEO requires everyone to disarm in meetings – leave tech at the door.

Three kinds of meetings at MS

– free for all

– you must pay attention if at the table, unless at back of room

– meetings where total attention is demanding.

Larger pattern at work. Shifting into a new cycle -an evolving set

Attention is dynamic – socio-cultural influences. use of attention and how it evolves is a thread. 20 year social cycles – but they are generalisations.

We take a set of beliefs to an extreme; the extreme fails; we seek what we repressed.

1945 the org was central – Authority

Culture was that employer/marriage community was key

Was a belief that by serving employers, marriage we would be happy. Service to the institution would bring us happiness, so focused on that which served the institution, and stursted experts and authority to filter out what was not important.

In the 60s, it was more about self-expression, a 20 year period all about ‘me’.

Trusted ourselves; entrepreneurial – co’s like Apple

Paid attention to that which created personal opportunities. Gave full attention to software like Word or Excel because we saw it as providing opportunities.

Fragment attention if it enhanced opprtunity

Multi-tasking was a super-functional adaptivity.

one employer to many, marriage to a rising divorce rate

20 years of all-about-me increased narcissim and lonlieness.

1985-2005 – networks has been the centre of opportunity. Getting things done usedto mmake us feel alive, now it’s connectivity.

Connection was the aphrodisiac.

CPA is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour.

ADD is a disfunctional variant of CPA Myspace/friendster which count false connections – the lack of meaning underscores the emptiness of promiscuous connection.

The iPod is as much about a way to make a protected space as a personal playlist.

Not “what do I have to gain?” but “what do I have to lose?” – Fear.

Look to Institutions for trust rather than excitement.

New aphrodisiac in the new era is comitted attention, intention, focus, experiencing engaged attention

Our opportunity is to develop the tools and technologies to take our power back so that it really does enhance our quality of life.

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Steve Gillmor (moderating), Glenn Reid, Doree Duncan Seligmann, David Sifry, Linda Stone

[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, and me. EAOE.]

Glenn Reid

Began 20 yrs ago with Adobe, and thought was buildingn software, but software lets people create things and communicate.

Buliding new networks of filters with the blogosphere. Someone who has time to filter saves you the time to do it yourself.

Doree Duncan Seligmann

How to inject humanity into technology.

How to be aware of what’s happening while you’re in a collaboration. Other systems looked at how you could put a lot of information together, blurring the boundaries between ?? and information. Web pages would actually age and show their uses (nice). What working on now: Addressing the issue that you have all these communication devices – laptop, cellphone and peripherals – and they might all be demanding your attention. How do we provide a protective shell around the user to manage these dynamic devices to service users and protect the users from them. New phone of the future.

Dave Sifry of Technorati:

I think about attention quite a bit. Micro/macro economic terms – what is the attention of Web 2.0 – what is the thing that is scarce: people’s time. The definition of attenntion: time directed to a purpose by a person.

Whether you’re Bill Gates of a Masai warrior you have 24 hours in the day – that’s it, and that’s fundamentally scarce. What you do with that time – (lakoffian reference).

We talk about ‘spending time’ – analyses of scarcity and apply that to people’s attention.

The neat thing about computers ideally is that we can capture how we spend time, without changing our work. People woudl rather be strangled than forced to put into a taxonomy or express why they did something.

If you can enable the computer to watch what you do and see how you are spending your time, you can share that information and analyse what people look at, and use collaborative filtering to allow others to direct your attention.

The Google hypothesis was that the hyperlinks is a vote of attentions. Hyperlinks are a social gesture.

Where do I spend my time today? Chances are there are other people with more time and expertise in an area, and how can they help me spend my time.

Linda: what concerned me was that we do need to think about it analytically – leisure time is what makes us human; not mapping every minute makes us human. An over-emphasis on efficiency is suspicious. Over-emphasis on parenting – maximising playdate opportunity. Parents now want to protect their children from crazy schedules. Keep in mind that some needs to be really unstructured so we can be creative

SG: make things more efficient in other areas so we have leisure time.

It’s a lifestyle choice about prioritisation

L: we have been enamoured of what tech can do that we have surrendered to these opportunities.

Glenn: Responding to e-mail all day as a job – how is that contributing to the economy – it’s a river of crap in some ways.

DS: who owns the data on yourself?

SG: why don’t the users own that data?

Glenn: danger of collecting everything

SG: Data Roach motel -= your metadata goes in and never comes out. Dave, is attention.xml anonymising data?

DS: we all own our data – it is ours – especially as personal as where we spend our attention. having a service provider to store it is fine, but need to be able to get it out and transfer it. There is a tremendous temptation towards lock-in, and that is a slippery slope.

Who owns your data? We start from the assumption that it should be ours. This allows service providers to be of service. So, we need an interoperable file format.

Attention.xml is a simple file format to describe this. There is no personally identifiable information in the file itself; it can’t be tied to me.

Glenn: is this being collected?

SG: everyone is collecting now – what you look at Google

Linda: In order to gather data it’s a political issue not a technology one.

Personal workspaces – dynamic set of devices that you’re managing as a cohesive whole. People have jsut a wiresless headset but can manage their availabity by tracking them.

Glenn: When people are striving towards real-time communications, that’s only half true, because only half the people ware interested in real-time, ie. the person making the call. IM has a problem as there is no voice-mail equivalent. Email vs. IM as two different industries is only temporary.

Linda: need synchronous to synchronous, and we are still struggling with that.

Steve: I’d like to kill email. But let’s talk about RSS. Email is bieng used as a store, and there isn’t any store tech in the RSS space.

Dave: We have stds about what feeds your’e subscribed to. OPML. Great for saying ‘this is a list of feeds’ but not nearlly rich enough to descirbe what have i actually read, when, on what device. The vision that Steven and I was creating a new open ecosystem, for the readers and not just the publishers. So if i’m reading on my online Newsgator account and I have a mobile device i should be able to sycn simply. so if iread on my mobile or mac it hsould sync w. the bloglines account or PC, and that is a imple case of being able to say ‘this iswhat i’ve read’.

Can flag things, and rate things. and sometimes these are user entered, and sometimes it’s just based on how uch time you spent reading something. Fo rme to check off a box and marking it as read is different to spending actual time reading.

Glenn: it’s usenet over again

SG: talk about a river of crap

SG: Implicit and explicit metadata.

LS: I actually like an increased flocus on implicit information and having 11 or 12 years ago worked on some of the early virtual words techs, where you had to turn a massive crank to show the slightest change, our authenticity is in the implicit aspects and it’s incrediblyu important to build that in. To balance that with some of the explicit stuff is useful.

Glenn: the amount of time that you’ve’ been idle in IM is an implicit information. Who worries about being seen to be idle?

LS: Re-reading McLucan – very relevant for today. medium is the massage. (medium is the message is the previous book).

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Philip Evans / Dick Hardt / Greg Lloyd / Sean Park / Julius Genachowski

[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, and me. EAOE.]

First guy: Found John’s comments extraordinarily persuasive. Particularly intrigued by one story – in 1st feb 1997 at a place called Carrier, a factory burned down. They made certain kinds of pressure valves. It was the only place athat made these things, and toyota’s leanness meant that there were no replacements. In the next few days 62 countries swarmed on the problem to come to a solution.

Philip Evans (?)

Few principles:

– technology needs to be simple and pervasive – much more important than complexity and sophistication – linux is basically written using e-mail and listservs

– some principles of intellectual property – normally ways that allow some forms of intellectual property to be shared

– process knowledge is treated as a commons – everyone contributes and everyone benefits

– scientific discipline – test and check everything.

– granular diffusion of the information – you don’t only do an experiment but you tell everyone about it – not big powerpoint presentations – small, frequent and granular information (when people are talking a lot, they develop a richer language in which their conversation can take place – shorthands, words, concepts AND TRUST – lots in game theory about how you develop trust in game theory when you play games a lot of times.)

– visibility, transparency and frequency of comms build trust and that lowers transaction costs cf. wiki / blogging etc. all of these communities exemplify the same principles – the scaling of the network drives down transaction costs, and the lowering of transaction costs drives up the scaling of the network. Virtuous circle.

Julius:

Didn’t set out to create a community of people who were interested in going to concerts or sporting events, but we did. (More examples about accidental creation of communities in sports and dating and stuff).

Looking at ways to turn users into participants. At the beginnings of that with several of the businesses, and the results so far are very exciting. Ticketmaster runs an online magazine – info on concerts / going on tour etc. – ‘threw up on the live daily site’ (!!!) – simple forum site and they were pretty surprised by how quick the take up was. Without any promotion – 10,000 users, 2 /12 million threads. “Does anyone know when Eminem’s on Tour”. Expedia was built on first three stool legs – on the side there was a business called trip advisor that made no transactions but was really focused on user-community content – reviews of hotels. It’s business model was then to have relationships with advertisers and charge for click-throughs. “Began to see for the first time the power of empowering the community”.

We have to be willing to have consumers trash our products in order to have a customer base that trusts them. They are just starting to think abou thow to use wikis and blogs on their site. People have made the point that tools need to be simple so that htey can be embraced by consumers, so are looking at ways to simplify them and get them out to consumers.

Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity)

What is identity? A shitload of stuff. (he shows his school, house, town, bank cards, and so on)

How identity was conveyed – by voice.

Now it’s by photo ID, so you can prove who you are.

ID is reputation.

Digital ID can be thought of as site regestration, but that’s a big hassle. But is it ID or just forms? It’s just authentication to prove you are a directory entry.

how do i prove who I am online? It’s not possible today – digital ID is not what you give to the site but what the site knows about you.

E.g. Ebay reputation – you can’t take it to Craig’s list, it’s not your reputation it’s their reputation because it’s a closed site. Site-centric. ID 1.0.

Basically identity 1.0 is walled gardens and stuff, identity 2.0 is about connectiveity and web services between the various parts.

You need a way to port ID from site to site – ID 2.0. Difference between Dos and windows. But to do that you need ID on web services.

Full access or no access and it doesn’t scale so SXIp is trying to bring around identity 2.0.

[critique is that he is confusing the objects for himself; if your identity is defined by the stuff you carry in your wallet, you are a hollow man]

Greg Lloyd – Traction Software

Traction makes enterprise weblog software – ‘weblogs for groups with a goal’ – there are significant difrerences, but the major point is: the use of social software tools / the expectations that are set on the public internet will drive the structure of businesses in two or three years.

The new generation infrastructure – web search, wikis, content search engiens, feeds etc – are changing the way people’s expectations are set about how they keep informed about what matters to them. If you can do that on the public internet, why should a business person settle for less?

Two particular points on how social software and new generation web infrastructure adapts to group use:

(1) the ability to address specific audiences / groups

(2) in order to broadly deploy this sort of thing: (a) a notion of identity that works across all stakeholders (b) a notion of local permission based upon that ??? without needing an IT org hardwire all the connections.

Example: An engineer in General Motors. Someone in germany creates a weblog creates a weblog and puts it on a network accessible to me. it’s talking about a particular transmission design. I would like to be able to find out about that weblog within the GM domain simply by searching, finding someone else’s weblog that talks about it, subscribing to an RSS feed or joining it without subscribing to it. If I’m working with Suw, I’d liketo be able to say that her identity has this kind of thing and can do this kind of thing with bottom-up permissions.

JP Rangaswami, CIO Dressdner Kleinwort Wasserstein

To repeat cluetrain – markets are conversations. The business of an investment ank is based on relationships. Why are we here? We’re here to learn.

How can we use the tools that are currently coming though in the last few years in a firm with a distributed model in a decent way.

Focus on the role of the individual. We are building systems around the individual not the firm. The firm has a value set close or congruent with the individual which allows him to do shit.

Can’t tell people what devices to use anymore. Connection agnostic – wifi or bluetooth or whatever. In the meantime, you have to be able to search everything and find anything that you need to find in your archives. that’s a serious proposition and there are issues around IP and who owns the stuff that’s moving around.

Even with a production line company, there were people who didn’t make shit, but now individual has all sorts of knowledge and content to be able to collaborate to produce something that no individual can create. We use these tools to attract and retain the right people, and now the individual choses to stay with a firm instead of being there for life.

Diaggregated, democratised.

To have trust, you have to do that which is prudent.

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Productive friction in a Toyota factory. First moment anything goes wrong, the factory is brought to a standstill – but they freeze it because they need the context so they can do instantaneous problem solving because each one is a single point problem.

Break problems, e.g. how to build a motorcycle, down into bits and then do swarm innovation with different suppliers and sub-suppliers collaborating informally in tea houses. Thus they design a new motorcycle.

if you know what the final object must look like, then you can collaborate and do a sort of open-source design/development by collaboration and compromise so different suppliers understand how their pieces fit in to the whole and can compensate for others’ design quirks.

Not just orchestrating a supply chain, but also learning.

Offshoring is not just about wage rates, but also about access to distinctive capabilities in a niche ecosystem where suppliers are rapidly learning from each other.

Example: Telecare call centre, one of the best in the world. Middle managers purpose is to coach the employees, so each manager has only 8 employees. Leaning becomes a practice, not a process. They spend a lot of time – 25% – doing learning.

Convergence of new IT architectures and tools

– interaction tools: collaboration on demand, social software, wifi

– virtualisation architectures

– services oriented architectures: resources on demand, flexible access to distributed resources, rapid incremental improvements.

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Raph Koster (Sony Online)

JC Herz (Joystick Nation)

Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab)

Dennis Fong (Xfire)

Byron Reeves, Stanford Uni

Easier to place a phone call on Skype than to explain what it’s like to collaborate on a World of Warcraft quest. The virtual world is very complex – have to figure out who has which role, what they need to do, what the problem is, and how to solve it. There are multiple chats between different groups of players; there are logistics to be considered. Demographic is not 14 yr old boys – people spend significant amounts of time and money on this.

From a research perspective – why is this fun?

– games are a combination of reality and fantasy

– real people

– Unreal avatars and agents

– empathy for other players despite fantasy context

– activation in right inferior parietal region with real players

– brain region involved in self-other connectedness

Narrative context – story influences interest: more interesting if you know the story.

Failure doesn’t hurt.

Makes bonds with other people.

What if you could do work in this team? Create quick swat teams to handle a problem.

Lessons for work

– don’t underestimate fun

– clear challenge

– progress each time you log on

– rewards

Decentralisation of work

– self-organising and self-managed

[Damn, can’t type fast enough. Very interesting talk – hope the slides are up somewhere because they were very detailed and worth seeing.]

Jane McGonigal, 42 Entertainment – SuperGaming!

Using MMP gaming as a framework for real action – massively multiplayer offline real playing games.

Offline as in in real environments; real as in you are not using an avatar but your real identity.

Trend towards MMofflinerealPGs are

– massively scaled

– embedded in real everyday life

– heightens powers of individual

– sort of like supercomputing

Supergaming is social networking that is ludic.

– shared rules

– known goal

– synced playful behaviours

Spectacular

– public display

– large or lavish scale

– contrast, friction and surprise

Use

– PDAs, cellp hones, wifi laptops, digital cameras

– SNS, blogs, SMS, wikis, tagging software, public message forums

Must be pervasive and persistent.

Examples that happened in San Francisco

Flash mobs

I Love Bees

Go Game (urban superhero game)

Flashmob supercomputer meet-up

[She here describes the experiences of taking part in these events.]

[Other stuff said… but you know the drill by now.]

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Bill Schlough (SF Giants)

Why does wifi make sense for a baseball park? The Giant’s business objective is to win the World Series. Use tech to enable success on the field, including video coaching and scouting app, started in 2000. But more about taking care of the fans in the ballpark, so how does wifi make money? It’s free, and a few other ballparks are experimenting, but no one knows what the business model is but yet various marketing partners like the fact that there is free wifi that the fans can use. Marketing partners want to get their wifi devices in the hands of the fans and they are together figuring out how to use wifi to do that.

Fans use wifi at the ball park for two reasons

– to stay connected, do email, specially when losing 16-3.

– to use interactive services provided by the Giants, such as digital dugout which you need to be at the ballpark to use.

Peter Sisson, Teleo

What VoIP means to telecoms. Billions of dollars of telecoms equipment is about to become irrelevant, but this creates a lot of opportunity.

Old thinking was that telecom was equipment, but now it’s software. VoIP is a computerised device.

Old thinking was that voice is a separate service, but now voice is just a feature, i.e. you can do voice over any equipment. No sense to keep data and voice apart.

Use Teleo to turn Outlook into a telephone. Add a tool bar so you can phone someone who emailed you by a single click (if you have their phone number in your address book). Any phone number on the web – just click and then it makes the call.

New revenue models

– 800: paid inbound calls with 800 numbers

– pay for placement in yellow pages

– pay for search engine placement

Combine those so local plumber bidding for placement on Google, but when you click on it you get put through on the phone.

Stuart Henshall (Skype Journal)

It’s not Vonage who are defining VoIP, it’s people like Skype. User models are different for Skype – people who leave Skype on all the time so that they can just have presence. Allows easy conference calls. Changes the way we think about communications. Can create presence in a simple way.

[Excerpts from the discussion.]

Bill: Chicken and egg problem – how many people bring a laptop into a ballpark? Get 100 – 150 laptops per game, but it’s the wifi PDAs that will be used. They make more sense, the LifeDrives and iPaqs the wifi-enabled Treos. But the business people will bring more laptops on a weekday game than a weekend game. So as these connected devices become more common then they’ll see more uptake.

There’s an issue of ‘cool’ too – here it is cool to have a laptop, but at a game it is not. What if a there’s a ‘fly ball’ that smashes your laptop screen? That’s not cool.

Privacy – if can do replays online, then people will share devices in a collaborative, social way.

There are different demographics that we deal with, but it’s not to much women vs. men, but age. Business people are looking for an opportunity to stay in touch witht he office, to leverage the Digital Dugout, to use that information. Don’t see kids with PDAs, but you will, and we will be ready for it.

Peter: I find it’s impossible to predict what people do with technologies, and if you try you get it wrong. I never wanted a camera in my cellphone, but now I’m sending people pictures all the time. When IM came out, I thought why not send an email, I just didnt’ get it, but now I IM constantly.

There are nuances. IM is right for some conversations, but sometimes email is better, or a phone call. I always fail when I try to predict what people will do with technologies but it’s amazing what people will do with them.

Stuart: One thing to watch is what is going to happen with dual mode handsets, wifi and GSM, so what emerges in terms of linux based. Skype is cross-platform, and have Linux and Symbian, so when they do they will have presence on your mobile phone with your buddy list, so it’ll be a new Plaxo. So if a Skype-like product really emerges and becomes effective in a wifi-centric world, is that the UI and the interface you want to use?

The handset becomes the phone via wifi. It becomes about useabilty and simplicity.

Point from floor: VoIP is by the telecos for the telecos. Skype is for the people.

Question: What if city-wide wifi comes, will that affect your ballpark wifi?

Bill: Not really, if it comes, we’ll embrace it and we don’t care if it’s our wifi or someone else’s.

supernova2005

Since Anderson published the original Long Tail chart, two things have changed. Firstly, the niche sellers in the long tail are selling more, so the tail is growing as a fraction of the whole. Moving from an era of mass markets to millions of niches.

1990: Explosion of products [numbers, not blowing products up]

Now: Explosion of information about products

Forces in the long tail:

– democratisation of tools of production – PCs make making it cheap

– minimise transaction costs – internet makes selling it cheap

– power of consumer WOM – internet makes talking about it cheap

Three opportunities

– long tail aggregators, reach the head and the tail, e.g. Amazon

– niche suppliers, get aggregated by someone else

– filters, help people find what they want

More likely to find satisfaction in the long tail, but have to look harder for it.

Have always had filters, but these are pre-filters, like editors of a mag who decide what goes in. Now we have post-filters, e.g. peers who review after publication.

Flattening the long tail affects which business models are viable. Long tail distributors can supply more different products.

[Anderson then goes on to show a bunch of graphs, not many of which I agreed with, but without them it’s hard to make notes. This guy talks at a speed which makes me look like an amateur. This talk is a repeat of a workshop that was on yesterday which I missed, but which Nat wrote up on his blog.]

supernova2005