The same drive, true since the human race was spread out in pockets on the Sahara savannah (which wasn’t a desert back then), is one of the reasons us humans love to go to conferences, to pick up the phone, to read blog entries like this one. We’re simply the chatty animal.

I’ve dabbled in mapping the rate of human innovation to two other variables, the latency between our minds and the bandwidth with which we are able to transmit information. 8000 years ago, on that savannah, there was a local group of people we knew in detail, and every so often we got together with other groups of the same size to exchange goods and stories.

The first major society came about in the Nile valley, since catastrophic climate change dried out the lush savannah and the closest major body of water was the mighty Nile river. This made it possible for even more humans to exchange even more information, thus ideas, and we got amongst other things the written language.

Written language means we could now store information over time. It became possible to tell people, not to Google it, but to go read the walls in the temples.

Cutting the rest of the list somewhat short:

[...] Library of Alexandria, the printing press, the telegraph, newspapers, photography, telephone, TV, modems, Internet, mobile phones, mobile Internet devices [...]

… brings us to today. Most people reading this blog probably carries a mobile, with which they feel constantly in the know. No information is more than a few clicks away, and that has changed a lot of the activities that only a few years ago were very different. When I grew up, out in the countryside, I sometimes called a friend in the slightly smaller town six miles away to say I was coming over before jumping on my bike. When I arrived there could’ve been a change of plans, his family were suddenly not at home and I couldn’t call them. They couldn’t call me. It was a black hole of unused time (although I got a lot of exercise).

That doesn’t happen today, and we’re on our way to change our reality in an equally disruptive way again. We still, even with our most modern mobile devices, experience information through a “keyhole”. If I want to read the text someone just sent me, I felt the buzz in my pocket, I need to first pull out my mobile – read it – and when I’m done I’m going to put down the mobile again.

There’s a waste of attention span here. When something happens that interests me (of which I’m in control, depending on where I am and what I’m doing) that should be visible to me without me having to perform an expensive task switch or navigate about my plethora of devices.

The interaction part of our digital experience is going to [have to] move up into our active attention sphere – in front of our eyes, with completely new ways of interface navigation possibilities.

Granted, I only started wearing glasses a few months ago, but even the slightly better vision they give me – or for many just the ability to dim strong sunlight – is enough for us to put them on our noses. If we in addition get the opportunity to experience a much fuller reality, where we can gain additional knowledge about the world around us as well as being able to interact with other minds with even lower latency and higher bandwidth, we will.

Augmented Reality visors will continue the path of merging man and machine, technological human-to-human communication devices, raising the possible speed of human innovation once again.

See you at the conference! In addition to everywhere else I’m naturally going to be at the “Our relationship with technology” discussion table

Of course, if you recognize the argument, it’s what later became Shirky’s latest book – Cognitive Surplus. I’ve used it to good effect in my own presentation series over the last few years and in a world where we see a whole generation watching less and less TV and Linchpins eager to put the available creativity to good use – what do we do?

Well. Apparently we spend over 3 million hours each day launching birds into pigs.

Gaming is, however, a lot better for our creativity than TV. One of the more creative of games, being compared to playing with Lego, is Minecraft. It’s a sandbox game, where it would be difficult to describe what if anything the real purpose of the game is. It’s also actively played socially together with others, making it participatory. Lego is said to have been the inspiration for many future engineers – I’m one myself.

These games can be quite addictive as shown by Minecraft’s moniker “minecrack“, and that might be slightly worrying. If we go back to pre-digital times, no matter what our creativity was used for it’s likely it was something physical that lived on when we ourself moved on to other things. We recognize a lot of these creative works as art today, antiques, items that sometimes furthered society.

Digital creativity – value – in virtual worlds only exists for as long as we keep that digital world alive. When the next thing comes along, when I stop creating huge (and time consuming) beautiful structures in Minecraft, they’re gone – forever. True, this is the same with a non-digital sandbox or toys like Lego, but these games are played by the adult population to a much higher degree.

Being a futurist, I love doing projections. Since my answer to the common motivator “Think outside the box!” is -What box? I also sometimes explore boundary conditions by taking projections to their extreme. One answer to Fermi’s paradox is that all sufficiently advanced civilizations spend all their time doing virtual exploration and work inside simulations.

Back to reality – I love Shirky’s argument. I’m slightly worried we’re spending our newfound creativity surplus on things that only have fleeting purpose though, satisfying our neural pathways for the moment but with a bitter aftertaste.

The current buzz du jour is Gamification, and maybe that’s a solution. Make the real world more game like.

(If we’re sufficiently advanced, maybe it already is)

In my presentation series over the last few years a key recurrent theme has been what’s sometimes called “the gift economy” (and I recommend Tor Nørretranders’ excellent book The Generous Man on the subject). What we usually refer to as business, “the gold economy”, is only part of all the ways humans interact, and keep track of the value of those interactions.

Another part of my message has been the evolution of interaction from static, to search, to social. It’s very obvious that social is part of the gift economy, and vice versa. The concept of social currency captures this pretty accurately.

It’s not enough interacting one-way with everyone around you, your company and the products you create. As Eric von Hippel has shown, innovation tends to happen outside of your chosen four walls. That’s true also for the reputation based economy, the social currency, where the value of something kept behind closed doors would be less than if it’s made public. The observation of interest here being that this is true not only for things, but for the persons involved in creating those things as well.

The value of your employees increase the more they’re able to interact with everyone else. When their ideas are made visible they’re vetted and the social currency of both the employees and the ideas themselves are made part of the global knowledge economy. The alternative is for your employees and ideas to wither behind an iron curtain, unable to openly compete on equal terms.

I suggest porous companies, those that let ideas and their proponents be part of something bigger, are not only able to make better use of global knowledge but also to offer a more attractive workplace. Open Innovation is thus not only a buzzword affecting the way you do product development, but also part of the cost & benefits package you offer your employees.

When you have your next incredible idea, you’re going to talk to people whom you know do great stuff. If the great stuff I’ve done is locked inside a filing cabinet with our legal department, that won’t be me.

Let’s do porous.

Actually, that’s only true most of the time. When traveling, although there are some exceptions, that augmentation of mine is cut off. I become disconnected – and it hurts.

I’m writing this while on a train, which is one of the more positive traveling experiences. My mobile is connected throughout the trip, and if the train company offers WiFi (or I bring my mobile broadband) my laptop is as well. Since the train manages to arrive at my destination without needing my constant attention and guidance, I can also write blog posts like this one. Let’s claim that trains fulfill two of the three needs I’ve identified as being important when traveling – and let me get back to what they are in more detail later.

Tomorrow I’m going to catch a plane to Munich, where I will participate in a panel on Thursday with a topic related to this blog post. I fly quite a lot. When in an air plane, being connected becomes more complicated. We’re told to turn our mobiles off (with dubious motivation, but that’s a topic for another time) and to only use non-wireless equipment while in the air. To be fair, there are some airlines now offering in-flight WiFi, but it’s still an exception. I’d say flying currently only fulfills one, maybe two, of the three needs we have when traveling.

The conference I’m going to be at is Telematics Munich, an event focusing on the in-car digital environment. I like cars. I’ve had a driver’s license for about 18 years now and for most of that time I’ve commuted daily by car. For traveling, it’s a strange environment. While passengers in a car have a similar experience to passengers on a train, it’s quite hard to be connected as a driver. There’s no problem with the actual connection to the Internet, but since constant attention is needed to stay (safely) on the road there’s a struggle of concentration. Some research claims that the dangers we associate with using mobiles when driving is actually due to the shift in attention, and while headsets and voice commands allow us to at least have our hands free it’s still not optimal, and this is an area where I project a lot of future development to take place (not only self-driving cars, as is being researched by our friends at Google). Driving, currently, can be said to barely fulfill a single one of the three needs we have when traveling.

In my view, those needs are:

1) Being connected [to the Internet]
2) Having available attention [to act upon events]
3) Reciprocating information [about the travel itself]

This third need is barely being tapped into at the moment, and this is where I see very fertile grounds for new ideas and new business opportunities. One of the first well executed solutions I came in contact with was Waze, the crowd sourced navigation service. It feels quite natural that it’s the current speed with which you can travel on a specific road that’s important – not the speed limit or historic data. The current road conditions being easily crowd sourced from the very ones currently traveling on that road, and easily collected through their Internet connected mobiles.

But what about all the other dynamic conditions around us when traveling? Seatguru helps me select good seats when flying, but how can I find out where the currently shortest queue is for the bathrooms? Is there fresh coffee in the bistro on this train right now? Do I know the persons in the car in the other lane up ahead?

Let’s call it social. It’s either the perfect use of an otherwise overused term, or it’s at least the best one I could find. I want traveling to become more social, dynamically, at the point of need, where everybody reciprocates.

This is what I want to discuss in my panel at Telematics Munich. I’m currently on the first leg of a train-flight-car trip to get there.

I predict the same thing happening not only to the small screens in our pockets, but our big screens hanging on our walls. The thing we still call “TV”, which even with the latest sets that can connect to specific Internet services, is pretty non-smart.

Depending on where you live (and if you’re an early adopter), you’ve either upgraded once or twice over the last ten years. One move to flat screens and one to HDTV, or both upgrades at the same time. The industry is at the moment in the startup phase of another upgrade, to 3D.

I claim that 3D is not the next must-have feature, the one that will get consumers to upgrade their sets again. I claim openness – the same disruptive shift that is currently happening in the mobile industry – is about to happen to the TV industry as well. 3D will tag along, the actual device tech is not that much more expensive if you’re going through the early adopters once again, but it will not be in the driver’s seat.

Disruptive shifts are hard to predict, and they cause havoc in the market place. Established truths and important players might get switched around, and existing predictions get thrown off the mark. That is, the exact same thing as we’re currently seeing in what’s – in error – called the “smartphone bloodbath” by Tomi Ahonen (who is otherwise my first stop when I need numbers!).

Current predictions of the potential size of the 3D TV market are based on consumers reacting to the 3D proposition itself. If you throw complete openness in to the mix, where the big screens on our walls become as intelligent as the small screens in our pockets are becoming, I’d claim the size of that market – as well as the speed of its creation – is severely underestimated.

Openness will fuel the next TV upgrade cycle. It will, as usual, be quite disruptive.

PS: Don’t miss out on the additional discussion seen in the comments below!

Until last week, while on vacation in Protaras, Cyprus. When I was visiting different establishments in Protaras town and couldn’t find them in one or either of the services, I – as usual – added them myself. Oddly enough, Foursquare kept telling me after I had added some of the places that I was too far from them to be able to check in (or, get the points and badges for the check-ins at least).

Being of an investigative mind, I started thinking about what could be the cause, and came upon the following explanation. In their effort to curb cheating, Foursquare matches my geo coordinates to street addresses, and then does a reverse lookup on the address they got and match it back to my coordinates when I try to check in.

That system likely works well where the service they use to match coordinates to street addresses is of high enough granularity, but causes the problem I experienced in areas less detailed. In Protaras, the main street is a mile or so long and all locations are matched to “Protaras Main St”. The reverse geo lookup for that main street results in coordinates placed in the middle of its full length – and thus whenever you’re at an establishment at the beginning or end of the street, Foursquare’s cheat detection system kicks in.

This, then, becomes somewhat funny when you’re the one that just created the venue seconds before – as my recent tweet on the subject tried to capture:

While this specific example has a simple solution – anyone who just created a venue at a certain geographic location is likely at that certain geographic location no matter what the street address reverse lookup says – the point I’m trying to make is that while our automated systems keep getting smarter there are instances where we’re sometimes trying too hard. When we do, if there’s no possibility for the user of the system to correct the automation we cause frustration. Since we’re increasingly relying on crowd sourcing in mapping the world around us there’s very little room for frustrated users.

When context awareness and expert systems work, we seldomly notice them. When they fail, the result is often worse compared to not having tried at all.

It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?

Sony Ericsson Web 2.0 Expo New York booth

As you might’ve seen if you follow me on Twitter – @troed – I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York this week. While some of my thoughts on the conference are in my tweets, more will come when my hotel gets the Internet back up working (or I get back home) – but until then there’s one observation I’d like to share.

I now know why some believed teenagers weren’t using Twitter.

No matter where you happen to work, it’s a sure bet to claim that the majority of innovation in operating system features (scheduler advances, memory allocation algorithms), applications (music players, games) and services (location based wikis, streaming media) comes from others. When not affiliated in a way that makes the choice of for you, you tend to choose a system where you have easy access to make modifications – often Linux and other unix derivates.

Open source is a bit like basic research in that there’s no immideate economical benefit for the person(s) sharing innovations with others, but everyone knows that building a better common base allows for greater later innovations (similar to applied research).

Thus, once innovation has happened – and it’s likely it will have happened on an open source system – it will spread to similar or compatible systems. If someone were to publish a better process scheduler, it would quickly spread to platforms where no or very small changes to the original invention are needed.

These platforms would score higher on the Speed of Innovation criteria.

Now, of course it’s possible to duplicate all the innovation (according to some measure of relevance) to a proprietary platform, but it’s quite expensive (and more so the larger the differences from the original). This can be quite hard to accept if you’re a company with an existing large investment into a proprietary system, but as Seth Godin says – we must ignore sunk costs.

Now, not everything has to do with low level operating system APIs. There’s been a shift towards open third party development lately, especially on the smartphones-that-aren’t-smartphones. This has happened partly due to a change in turnaround times from development to getting the application into the hands of actual users (via app stores) but also due to an increase in platform capabilities and better development environments. The future in this area is projected to be what’s called web application development, web apps, and thus in the Speed of Innovation metric we need to take that change into account as well.

Interestingly, it’s the same thing. There’s one web component available, open source, where much of the innovation in the field tends to happen – Webkit. As detailed above, that component is available on unix platforms and if you’re already working with such a platform all new developments benefit your system with no or minimal changes.

Combining an open platform where much code already exists with a modern web engine and display framework and you get a platform where third party innovation will happen at a rapid pace. So rapid, it suddenly becomes less interesting to look at actual support for feature X today, and instead plot a trajectory where feature X is likely to have been supplied by someone, within a certain time frame.

It’s thus less a game of writing long lists of requirements, and more a game of simply (hah) projecting general technological development. Us futurists love to do that. For everyone else:

If you’re a developer, you want to be where you can fulfill your vision.

If you’re a consumer, you want to be where you can do what you want to do.

If you’re a handset manufacturer, you need to be where that innovation happens.

Android™ by Sony Ericsson – the XPERIA™ X10


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