Pablos comes and stirs things up

"Pablos" is quite a well-known hacker, security expert and futurist, who I saw give a great presentation at the DLD Conference earlier this year, so invited him to come to Helsinki and talk to Nokia.

He's worked on numerous cool projects, such as OQO and the hackerbot - which drives up to people with open wifi and shows them their passwords. We had a roundtable brainstorming with him afterwords and my key takeaway was the many overlaps that exist between the murky world of hacking and the gleaming prize of innovation. As we start to launch our new internet services, we're going to need to learn how to be fuzzier, murkier and more willing to embrace the hacker ethos that Pablos and his uni-named friends embody.

Enterprise2.0 - what does it mean for mobile?

In the past few weeks I’ve been having a number of interesting conversations about “Enterprise2.0”, what it means for mobility in general and for Nokia in particular. Despite a handful of productive and insightful commentators, it’s rather an anemic oeuvre compared to its Big Brother Web2.0 with very little written on the mobile aspects – as we could probably expect, given its U.S. origins. So, I’ve had some chats with some reliably smart folk such as Marc Orchant and Ajit Jaokar (who has also started musing on the topic), done some exhaustive research (yes, dear reader, minutes not seconds), and am liking what I see. It seems that many of the defining elements of Enterprise2.0 are a natural fit to the mobile space, in particular the possibility to capture and more easily transmit new kinds of data (for example putting location, context and communication history as an integral part of E2.0 services), the modular architecture of web syndication (RSS and user-defined filters work well on mobile) and, not least, the opportunities for the mobile to replace the PC, in particular for small businesses and / or emerging markets.

All is not rosy however. The mobile industry faces major obstacles in being part of this interesting arena, for example i) fragmented mobile operating systems, most of which are not built from the ground up to be web native ii) the default PC-centric approach towards enterprise2.0 applications (big screen, keyboard and sophisticated browser) and iii) despite some signs to the contrary, still slooooow progress by the mobile operators to get out of the way of innovation and introduce transparent pricing and proper flat-rate tariffs.

So I’d propose that the mobile industry should stop scrapping over who gets which share of an ever dwindling consumer pie and instead target the bigger prize – helping companies go 2.0. And that means a new, open and collaborative approach with a much wider range of partners than the mobile industry normally works with, so that we can figure out how to bake mobility into Enteprise 2.0 from the start.  

Defining moments – people, not process

Definitions are often tricky, but in the case of Enterprise2.0, it shouldn't be hard - since it is really just Web2.0 goes corporate – from the frat-room to the boardroom. Harvard’s Andrew McAfee, one of those most active in the paternity battle for this new babe, defines it as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”. A more expansive view would also take in the people dimension, such as this summary from a recent Enterprise2.0 conference: "a radical change in the way businesses operate and is as much about the people, the culture and the processes as it is about the technology, tools and platforms.” So either way, this is a story of socializing the enterprise (not a word that comfortably fits in most capitalist dictionaries). But if this approach puts people front and centre in companies, rather than inflexible processs and acronyms, I’m all in favour.

McAfee provides a helpful acronmyn (SLATES) which highlights key 2.0 characteristics that will generally be found in these solutions: search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals. More explanations in his original paper. Social software is a key building block for Enterprise2.0, and it is starting to attract IT managers’ attention. Gartner’s July 2007 research paper, “The Emerging Enterprise Social Software Marketplace” predicts a compound annual revenue growth for social software of 41.7% through 2011 (from $120m last year to $700m in 2011). They say it’s now moving beyond the traditional blogs and wikis to include “social software platforms, bookmarking, communities of practice, discussion forums, expertise location and information feeds”.

The timing is right for this discussion, as Enteprise2.0 is rapidly going mainstream. McKinsey found three quarters of executives planning to increase investment on these kind of collaborative tools. A Forrester survey of 119 CIOs found 89% “had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging - and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools.”

So, to the mobile angle. Mobile has generally been the ugly duckling of the 2.0 world, but things are changing. Just when we were finally seeing mobile browsers tackle full Ajax-y web pages well and start to convince people thinking that the mobile web and the real web aren’t really that different, along came rich browsing applications that raised the bar still higher for our already fiendishly creative geeks. The Big Browser paradigm is inimical to mobile, and if we try and squeeze it into little screens it will end in tears. One example, while reading a NYTimes piece on how your friends can make you fat, I noticed that you’re able to double-click on any word in the story and pull up a definition of it, without that word being in hypertext. That is a fairly new concept to me, and if it becomes widely adopted, could pose yet another challenge for mobile, as today’s mobile browser user experience do not seem to allow such doubleclicks. However, we all know the world is going mobile. The interesting question is whether the mobile element will be an afterthought, tacked on with limited functionality, or will be a fundamental part of the experience from the beginning. So I looked back at the Web2.0 principles Tim O'Reilly wrote in 2005 that seem to have weathered the discussion well and have now become part of the furniture. Most of them as we can see are relevant to the enterprise space, but what do they mean for mobile?

1. The Web as a platform

On the consumer side, the Web is now clearly the global platform for developers, entrepreneurs and individuals. Consumer-focused startups now need a fraction of the money they used to in order to get up and running, and scale with relative ease. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook have brought social networking to the masses – people who neither know nor care that such a term exists. That this trend is going corporate is one of the tenets of Enterprise2.0. Consumerization of IT is afoot, and consumer-focused tools (IM, VOIP and social networks) are appearing either neat (19,337 Microsofties on Facebook) or diluted to taste (LinkedIn and other less colourful offerings). However, the fuzzy, beta-nature of many of these services mean they’re not suited for business critical functions such as the software that runs our big manufacturing plants. Also, it is still hard for web-based startups to break into the big corporate accounts – you can’t yet code a business lunch or round of golf in Ajax. Supporting this, the Forrester survey found that 71% of companies would prefer “tools to be offered by a major incumbent vendor like Microsoft or IBM [rather than] smaller specialist firms like Socialtext, NewsGator, MindTouch, and others”. So, the web is not yet as advanced for enterprise offerings as for the consumer side.

As for the mobile industry, let’s be honest – we still have a way to go. Fragmented operating systems, screen sizes, resolutions and capabilities frustrate development efforts, few entrepreneurs are making real money out of the mobile internet or seeing large scale service adoption, and few people would chose their operator (or handset maker? let’s see) to provide their social network rather than their fresh-faced, agile web innovator. However, let’s remember that the mobile is much more recent arrival than the PC, and there are uniquely challenging constraints regarding form factor, UI and battery life etc. It is worth mentioning here that Nokia has been focusing like a laser beam on this topic in recent months – it has dominated recent corporate strategy dicussions and is now at the core of our recent reorg and new company structure. Our CEO has made “we’re an internet company” pronouncements whenever he’s been offered a microphone; Symbian is taking great strides in becoming more developer and web-friendly, and our browser is one of the industry’s best kept secrets (and incidentally, shares most of its code with the iPhone). We’re also starting to deliver some rather funky new apps, including a mobile web server, real-world browsing and of course the web tablet and open-source Linux platform (Maemo). Advert over – but worth saying, and no doubt other mobile players are being active here. As an industry however, we’re still playing catchup.

2. Harnessing collective intelligence

Amazon is often held up as the first example of a service provider that lets users benefit from collective intelligence through their collaborative filtering engine. So, why would this not also work in areas other than books? For example, "intelligent" CRM software could scan the salesperson's customer responses, and suggests appropriate product offerings based on large numbers of other interactions, potentially also outside the company. (Actually, maybe it does already, it’s been a while since I worked in the industry). Most sales people are inherently mobile, and providing lightweight usable tools that expose this collective intelligence at the right time and in the right context, could be a very valuable offering to mobile users.

Wikis are great at capturing user-created intelligence and are rapidly becoming mainstream in the enterprise space, but if you’ve ever tried using one of today’s wikis from your mobile, you’ll appreciate the inherent problems here. Socialtext have been making moves in this regard, but here is a standard chicken-and-egg problem – limited demand resulting in limited development time, begetting limited offerings. UI and synchronization are the key issues to solve. As noted above, services requring smart and big browsers face an uphill struggle on the mobile. Today’s wikis often suggest side-by-side version control review, and require a big screen to see the differences. Synchronization is a key conceptual challenge with mobile, since they generally are not always on. Wikis rely on having one version of the truth – two people making changes to the same item when offline then syncing later makes would vex Schrödinger himself.

Today project managers in Nokia that I work with will generally just create an empty wiki space as they start a new project. This example is being played out across the corporate landscape, and could well disrupt collaboration applications that are built on the assumption that the designers – cut off from the action – know what’s right for each project. Here Nokia’s interests are well aligned with the wiki companies and web services companies in general – do away with the need for a PC and keep the smarts in the cloud. Once bottom up “architectures of participation” are in place, powerful learnings can then be harnessed - enterprise-focused social networking tools (Ryze, Tribe, LinkedIn) are able to unearth links, activities and dependencies around the organization which traditional hierarchies and organizational structures miss.

There are plenty of ways that mobiles could be used as both in-the-field data gatherers, providing relelvant context, or being the mobile manager’s tool of choice for viewing and interacting with the wisdom of the crowds who have gone before.

3. Data is the next Intel inside

A key element of anything with a 2.0–suffix is about shift of control and content creation to the edges. In most companies, ours included, there is a lot of valuable data being created by our employees and customers that is currently not captured or utilized. As the locus of value moves from product to service, capturing and understanding these conversations is becoming a key requirement. These customers and employees at the edge now have the tools, techniques and – significantly – expectations about their ability to make change happen. Wikis and blogs are now full-to-bursting with valuable first-person thoughts, reflections and data - some unstructured, others in an array of formats. This data is now the beating heart of today's enterprise, and often a unique repository of insights from the key experts in the company. Few senior managers will fully appreciate this resource because it has arrived via the back door.

Nokia's own efforts at promoting wikis and blogs internally continue and are now reaching mainstream. There is still however plenty more scope for their use in the harder-to-reach, business critical areas of the business, such as the sales teams and factory management. When you’re making 300m+ phones a year, the fuzziness inherent in wikis needs to be selectively applied. Also there is room for more innovation on top of the many tools that are available. TiddlyWiki (recently purchased by BT) integrates IP-communication plug-ins to the wiki framework, thereby allowing in-house IT executives to hack together innovative IP & mobile communication experiences, without needing long requirements lists, lead times, operator involvement or large amounts of money. They used to burn people at the stake for such heresy.

I expect to see companies doing more with wikis and blogs, using them for key product and customer data, with relevant user-level access controls if necessary. At Nokia we are using the open source MediaWiki engine used for a Nokia Infopedia, to make it easy for people to find and then use the key data about our products, solutions, organizational change initiatives, pricing, strategies, marketing initiatives etc. Often overlooked is the change of pace that needs to take place when the early adopter tools move mainstream - today's wikis are still too complicated and hard to use, so a top-down campaign to encourage wiki use will fail without adequate thought and resources being given to training and education, as well as experimenting with new simple UI developments such as drag and drop and other concepts that people are already familiar with. Salesforce.com's AppExchange and Jive Software's clearspace are interesting in this regard. We need to get the balance right between innovation and communication in order to bring all employees along this path.

Customer conversations that happen around our products represent the possibility to collect insanely valuable data, and engage in genuine conversations with the people who buy our stuff. Currently, as a product company, we don’t yet do this on a large scale – just a few pilot initiatives and ad hoc discussions around individuals’ blogs. Contrast this to Google - every second their search engine receives primary user data, about terms that matter to them, and the effect of every change that Google makes to its site can be callibrated immediately, and they can get a sense of the pulse of the world in real time.
       
Moving from the source of data to the type of data - we are going to be seeing next generation web services start to be built for a three dimensional world, and one in which context is king. This will massively increase the number and type of data-sources available as inputs in the creation of web services. The scope and type of services that can be built using this data are difficult to imagine, because so much of the web today is in two dimensions - when you are reading your email client, the email sevice provider does not know if you are in Sydney or Sidcup. 

Data can be defined broadly here - from active, user generated tags (modular, and easy to submit, so perfect for mobiles) to specific data, captured in the background such as usage and communication metadata. How easy is it for users of our devices to access their own data - where they've been, who they've talked to, what applications they've used the most etc? In short, not easy at all, yet.

Nick Carr highlights a critical piece of the puzzle suggesting that Enterprise2.0 may have a better chance than other new fangled technologies – they make life easier not harder. In particular, the system gets smarter as people use it normally. “Knowledge is captured, in other words, as it's created, without requiring any additional work”. The classic consumer examples here are Last.fm’s music recognition and Amazon’s collaborative filtering – both services allow your profile to become smarter and more helpful to you over time, if you give it access to what you do. So the incentive to use it increases. A fascinating question to me is to what extent can relevant data be automatically captured from the mobile device that you carry with you 24hrs a day, and itself be an input to new Enterprise2.0 applications. 

It is the different types of data available to creative entrepreneurs that should make the mobile industry sit up and take notice. Location information is one key ingredient that is trapped and lying dormant for want of a ha’penny of innovation. An entrepreneur I spoke to recently said he would have been charged €0.15 for each call that his application made to the operator to get a location fix from their cell ID. What a wasted opportunity to add value. He is obviously now routing round the roadblock and using GPS or consumer-created information database. Location is just one piece of data, but there are many others on the phone – which companies you call the most, who your friends are, who was in Bluetooth range over the past few days. With careful management and consumer-friendly usage, such data could lead to new technicolour applications and services that will make today’s Enterprise and Web2.0 services look black-and-white.

4. Perpetual beta

The mobile industry has unwittingly delivered plenty of betas in the past (WAP, MMS…), but they weren’t marketed as such. Instead of failures, they might have been seen as tentative first steps. But then it’d have been hard to justify charging consumers so much for them. Few in our industry seem to have recognized that the value of rich, direct feedback from users can far outweigh the minimal revenues that are captured by overpriced and underwhelming services. This requires a change in attitude, and a more open conversation with customers. This will in turn require changes in our transparency and "corporate voice". It is not about shipping and forgetting, but about partnering with customers who are trying to maximize the value of their investments. The Web2.0 software company 37signals does this well - a product-focused blog keeps news of almost-daily upgrades flowing and rapid and personal customer support for paying customers results in a high comfort level, and willingness to engage.

The beta mindset is coming to mobile: recent examples include Orange’s coding camp in August for developers in San Francisco (which perhaps included some marketing element to boost the launch of their Bubbletop web/widget service) and Vodafone R&D labs’ Betavine which aims to “encourage collaboration in the area of mobile and internet communications”. At Nokia, we’ve launched Nokia BetaLabs for the public and internally we have a service called AlphaLabs which now has about 75 applications and services for employees to test and provide feedback on. However, I see most of these activities as table stakes – we’re not really raising the bar of innovation beyond what is happening on the web, and in any event, it’s often far more challenging to be a beta tester on mobile – installation is harder (though our PC suite product is now actually pretty usable), user numbers are lower so there’s less feedback, and there’s always a danger that we’ll alienate (and bankrupt) our users who download data intensive applications without a decent data plan. Another challenge here is the current community forum experience on mobiles – it’s fairly poor, and most examples are just web-based forums squeezed to a small screen.

The more interesting issues relate to the topics that today’s beta aspects can’t handle well, and here mobile connectivity makes continuous feedback possible, and smart contextual awareness means that feedback can more easily be provided automatically. As mobile platforms mature and become more integrated with the web, expect to see greater use of the mobile as both a direct channel for feedback on mobile services, and a feedback tool integrated with existing web services (an example could be the integration of music recommendation service Last.fm with the music player on the phone).

5. Lightweight Programming Models

New open web standards are being deployed across the enteprise in particular to enable richer user experiences (e.g. AJAX), mashups (XML) and syndication of content (RSS). These allow individuals to create personalized feeds based on information that is important to them, but may not have a critical mass in terms of numbers of users, to get a tailored solution built for them. Related to this is the concept of "hackability" - how to make sure that the individuals (either employees or the customers-themselves) have enough control over the system to create their "own-label" solutions, and then, ideally share with others and improve for the benefit of the whole ecosystem. The concept of hackability is anathema to the mobile industry, and there are some pretty solid reasons for this: sensitive personal data and the ease of running up large bills being two obvious places to start. So clearly there needs to be some thought given to what is opened up and what is locked down. I’ve heard a number of people say that J2ME is not that interesting as you can’t do very much with it – such as accessing the calling and connectivity features. However, I’m a business guy not a technologist, so I can’t add much here, apart from to say that the mobile industry doesn’t have the luxury to sit on its hands and do nothing in this area, as our customers’ communication needs are increasingly being met by internet players who are embracing hackability.

One obvious example here are the core applications of the phone. How many fabulously interesting consumer and enterprise applications would be developed (within 24hrs) if web developers using lightweight protocols such as XML could easily gain access to the phone book’s contacts book, call log, message archive and calendar?

One test for lightweight programming models will be the extent to which "presence" becomes mainstream in corporate usage. Still the preserve of the young, IM-reared generation, and considered somewhat sceptically by incumbent executives, this is expected to become more mainstream. Alex Saunders has some good thinking around what he calls "new presence" with new value-enhaching applications such as call management, advertising, and enterprise solutions that are enabled by lightweight, interoperable web based standards such as XML. It is unlikely that the pace of innovation in this space will fit within the traditional top-down standards bodies processes; the mobile needs to allow innovators in to access the data and create new applications and services on top.

So, again, lots of potential IF the mobile industry embraces these lightweight models. In addition mobiles would work well with “loosely-coupled” services, such as mashups that tailor and filter data before it reaches you, helping you reduce information overload (one example would be an enterprise proximity social networking app that would display the current status of customers’ accounts that you are about to bump into at a conference). Maps mashup showing houses to rent within 500yards of where you are now). RSS is also well suited to mobile – not only does it deliver modular, packaged stories that work well on the small screen (or headset), but a feed reader or podcast client can load up a full days’ worth of content using free wifi.

6. Software above the level of the device

This issue shares many similarities with the “Web as a platform” principle, and if it is not handled well could represent a great sucking sound of value leaving mobile platforms. There is little point in having just a mobile platform – your services should be available on the mobile, just as they are on your colleague’s computer, or your car on the drive home. The mobile industry can no longer make phones that treat the web as a place to go, but needs to make devices that seamlessly extend the services available on the web, and provide the benefits of physical form.

Tim O'Reilly himself uses the example of the mobile industry’s biggest (unused) asset to date, the contacts book, to demonstrate how this will be affected:

"It's easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you've explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn't found in the local cache. Lacking an answer there, the system would query the broader social network".

We cannot just decide not to lose control of the contacts book – again, we do not have the luxury of choice. We need to actively ensure that core functions have an internet strategy including but not limited to: have the web as a back up, channel for access and platform for innovation.

The calendar function is similarly powerful, and there seems to be an opportunity here for a really good cross-device core application suite - seamless syncing the user’s core information across multiple devices and platforms, with a core offering that lives in the cloud.  Again we can turn to the web for lessons in innovation – Zyb, Soocial, Fidgt, Tabber, Anywr and of course Plaxo are doing fun things with contacts, 30boxes, and SyncMyCal making calendars work better, and RememberTheMilk and TaDa for task lists.

Apparently 93% of cameraphone photos never leave the phone – clearly because the software so far has not been above the level of a single device. This is changing too – companies such as Sharpcast and Shozu, and of course Nokia’s own Twango and Mosh, are intent on making it far easier to move media off the phone and on to the web.

In additon to core applications and one’s media taking to the cloud, the browser is also going agnostic and making the entire PC go virtual. Soonr allows you to access the contents of a remote PC from your mobile browser - something that shifts value away from the PC to the mobile. In the enterprise side, companies such as Zoho, DesktopTwo and ThinkFree are natural partners to mobile companies that seek to commoditize PCs – turning any of them into your own personal machine is true commoditization. So, again while it is still early days, the potential for mobile is strong – here we should aim to be a central part of an ecosystem in which intelligence lives in the cloud and uses the most appropriate device at the right time to allow the customer to intreract with the service.

7. Rich user experiences

Finally, the concept of user experience is key, and has been the driver of much of the shift towards consumer tools in the workplace. Compare the experience of using Skype with using our IBM-supplied IM Sametime-client and you see the point: one is fun, the other is grey. As Nokia we need to move beyond grey and give these tools a human face, this is perfectly consistent with our new tagline of creating “very human technology”.

The emerging "Millenials" generation (teenagers – 30yr olds) are looking to connect on a personal level with others, and more at ease with a meritocracy of ideas than a hierarchy of job titles. Creating visually appealling and accessible solutions (Second Life job interviews, Skyping the boss, AJAX interfaces on corporate websites) is going to be just another part of what it means to be Enterprise2.0.

What does this principle mean for mobile? Well, as processing speeds, screen resolutions and speaker qualities increase there is a natural tendency to make the phone sing, dance and perform to the nth degree. There’s certainly room for that in some consumer experiences, but when it comes to the enterprise space, a rich user experience gives me only what I want at the time I want it, and delivering this is the job of many of the principles above. Del.ico.us is a good example – almost everything on the page is there for a reason, and a click can filter and slice the data in intuitive ways. Efficient functions, no wasted space, no flashing gizmos – perhaps a good starting point for mobile service design?

Summary

Above I’ve reviewed O’Reilly’s original principles with my enterprise hat on, and with a mobile in my hand. It’s worth noting that these original principals were extended in a more indepth (commercial) report here, which gave a nod to Web2.0 poster child Chris Long Tail Anderson, and Dave Small Pieces Loosely Joined Weinberger. Dion Hinchcliffe notes that this report doesn’t change the substance of these principles, but does provide more context and affirms the link with Enterprise2.0 by providing more discussion of the enterprise impact.

Looking at it this way, the mobile seems to be an Enterprise2.0 story that is not often told, but one rich in potential. I’ve picked out a few potential implications for Nokia – and the mobile industry – that fall broadly into two categories - internally focused on improving our transparency, collaboration and speed, and externally focused, market orientated solutions, encompassing opportunities for both devices and services / solutions. I think this is a good time for us to take the initiative here - show the Internet incumbents (GYM) that we can match them at innovation, speed and customer-focus, and beat them solidly when it comes to helping companies adopting enterprise2.0 strategies that have mobile as a central element, not an afterthought.

_____________________________________

Some related resources:
Introductory slideshow to Enteprise2.0: http://www.slideshare.net/slgavin/meet-charlie-what-is-enterprise20 
Andrew McAfee: http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/the_three_trends_underlying_enterprise_20/
Dion Hinchcliffe: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/
Mark Orchant: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/
Don Tapscott on Enterprise2.0: http://www.enterprise2conf.com/whitepapers/pdf/enterprise2conf-donald_tapscott.pdf 
Ajit Jaokar: http://www.opengardensblog.futuretext.com/
Umair Haque: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/
Enterprise2.0 Conference, Boston, 18-21 June 2007 http://www.enterprise2conf.com/
- presentations here: http://www.enterprise2conf.com/2007/presentations/
Office2.0 Conference: 5 Sept 2007 http://o2con.com/index.jspa

Dan Gillmor speaking at Nokia

Dan Gillmor is rare in that he is both a leading commentator, as well as a creator, of the next generation of the Internet culture and business, having been a reporter for San Jose Mercury News for many years, and more recently as the founder and face of Citizen Media.

Given the obvious connections between increasingly powerful and Internet-connected mobile devices (sorry, computers) and empowered individual journalists, I've been trying to get Dan to come to Helsinki for ages and talk to us, and just before the Summer we managed it (video below). The slides don't really come out, but most of the info is in his talk anyway.



(In case you're wondering about his opening remarks, he slipped and fell over the carpet 2mins before this video started, spilling water over his laptop. Happily, damage to man and machine was not fatal.)

Looking behind the car seats to find half a trillion of value

Here’s a hypothesis: One of the most interesting places to look for new business value for the mobile industry is in the other industries that can be disrupted by the selective application of mobile intelligence.

The taxi industry is one such – an industry that is crying out for a dose of efficiency (or rather, has customers that are). How many people take cabs from any airport to the city centre, while the person behind them in the cab queue is about to do the same thing? Funnily enough, it again comes down to a communication problem – make it easier for the right information to pass between the right people at the right time, and you’ve got yourselves some savings, some of which could be turned into value (the way that Skype turns saving telco bills into willingness to pay).

My colleague Stephan Hartwig published a paper earlier this year about this that’s worth a read if you’re into this stuff. The intro says it all:

There are 500+ million privately owned passenger cars worldwide, thereof 236 Million in the US. These cars travel in the magnitude of 5 Trillion km per year. Let’s assume 2 empty seats per car and a small hypothetical value of only 5 cent per km and seat, the potential value of empty travelling seats amounts to 500billion€.

Of course, there are some pretty formidable social, technical and business model challenges to plugging into these opportunities, but that's what entrepreneurs are for. I wonder where else the selective application of mobile intelligence could also have the potential for change? Government tranparency and charitable donations could be candidates, and journalism and media in general surely have lessons to offer.

My MoSoSo preso

Just gave this presentation on mobile social networking to the Mobile Social Networking Conference here in San Francisco.



The deck lists 6 big ideas that I think will shape the space:
- Intimacy not irrelevance
- Push not pull
- Filters
- 3D not 2D
- Marketing not advertising
- P2P = Pocket to pocket

Business Week on Nokia

A nice piece about Nokia in Biz Week:

[Nokia] seems to be doing everything right these days. Nokia's supply-chain management may be the best of any company in the world. It has a big head start in fast-growing markets such as China and India. And it has $9.5 billion in cash and practically no debt, so it can invest far more than rivals on developing new products or conquering new markets—and thus build even more intimidating economies of scale

The guys at HQ can savour this for approximately 2 seconds, and then get back to being paranoid. Things go down as well as up, and we're not likely to forget it. My $0.02:

- The story focuses only on the "phone as the product" market, and the 40% market share that we've been chasing for a decade (and seems to be tantalising close). But I wonder if when we reach it, the concept will be meaningless. What will the definition of a "phone" be in 2-3 years? Is it because one of the multiple wireless engines (wifi, bluetooth, wimax), happens to use government regulated cellular spectrum that it counts as a phone? Despite the current iPhone boost to the concept of a product business, in the long term, margins on all such products are declining, and the key test for our future competitiveness is the extent to which we can nail the services that build on top of, and extend, the devices.

- Let's bring some of that prodigous Indian innovation back to our markets. The pieces highlights a "$45 model [that] can go more than two weeks without a recharge and has a built-in flashlight" and "[a Nokia van that provides] instruction on how to use mobile phones. Two ideas we should implement in UK asap! :)

Stop the misguided visionaries in Westminster Council before they do real damage

I thought this story must have been a joke when I first heard it. Apparently some bright sparks in London's Westminster Council are going to remove parking meters and instead rely on mobile phones for payments. The arguments, such as they are, suggest that it will be cheaper not to have to send people round to empty the meters, and it will be so much more convenient for the motorist, because they can for example add more time on by phone without going back to their car.

Unless there have been major usability improvements since I last was unfortunate enough to encounter Westminster's mobile payment parking process, I think this will be an unmitigated disaster. Clearly, saving money by axing parking attendants will be one benefit, but the real revenue will come in from fines for cars whose owners have failed to master the technology to book their slot. The usability of the scheme is so far away from acceptable that I'd be surprised if it doesn't result in a minor revolution (or the English equivalent thereof - a letter writing campaing to the Times).

Looking at the guidance material, it is clear that nothing has changed. The instructions for setting up payment are painfully complicated:

Call 0870 428 4009 and follow the touchtone prompts.
Using your phone keypad you will need to enter the following:
Your credit or debit card number
Card expiry date (2 digit expiry month, followed by 2 digit expiry year)
Card start date or issue number (debit card users only)
Vehicle registration number (VRN)*
*In order to enter your VRN, you need to press the key on your phone which displays the first character of your VRN followed by the number which represents the order it appears on that key. For example, for the letter ‘C’ you will need to press 2, followed by the number 3.

Have you got that? I had the unfortunate experience of trying out this mobile payments misery a few weeks ago, and after 5minutes of pain, gave up and went off to find a new non-mobile bay. Westminster Council helpfully provides a log-in option on their website to allow people to create accounts, and this seems to me the greatest ever folly. People who know about, and have registered in advance for the Westminster Council online membership scheme are probably locals, whereas logic suggests that the majority of those needing to pay for parking are from outside the borough, and have not the faintest idea of any of this.

I do applaud the ambition, and mobiles are wonderful things, but forcing people to use them when the technology and usability is not there, is just plain wrong. (As is assuming that everyone has them, and they haven't run out of battery or credit.)

We laugh at the futurists who expected all of us to be zooming round in our jetpacks by now; just because the technology is in place, it does not mean the experience is ready for the mainstream, be it in personal jet propulsion or mobile payments.

I do suspect that the secret agenda here is to make parking so terrifically complicated and painful, that people will leave the car at home. But if that is not actually the case, my suggestion would be to do as Oyster have been doing and trial NFC which seems a logical answer for mobile payments, and allow that to be an alternative channel, perhaps with a discounted rate to encourage adoption. Killing off cash at this stage would be premature, will unfairly penalized those with less tech savvy (am putting myself in that category) and, I predict, lead to far higher levels of pavement-rage, resulting in huge hospital bills that dwarf any short-term savings.

Westminster: Relent, before it's too late!

Finally, the truth about 2.0

This was picked up in an internal mailing list:

dsully: please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
jwb: you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.

Without a mobile, you're nobody

From Bruce Sterling's Wired piece (found on A VC):

Anyway, fact is, a passport is redundant — even if it's crammed full of RFID chips that howl your ID to every passing parking meter. The US should do what the Japanese do: track every foreigner's mobile. If he does anything freaky, jump on him.

"But Mr. Feldspar, suppose this international criminal doesn't carry a mobile?" demanded representative Chuck Kingston (R-Alabama). It would have been rude to point out the obvious. So I didn't. But look, just between you and me: Anybody without a mobile is not any kind of danger to society. He's a pitiful derelict. Because he's got no phone. Duh.

He also has no email, voicemail, pager, chat client, or gaming platform. And probably no maps, guidebooks, Web browser, video player, music player, or radio. No transit tickets, payment system, biometric ID, environmental safety sensor, or Breathalyzer. No alarm clock, camera, laser scanner, navigator, pedometer, flashlight, remote control, or hi-def projector. No house key, office key, car key... Are you still with me? If you don't have a mobile, the modern world is a seething jungle crisscrossed by electric fences crowned with barbed wire. A guy without a mobile is beyond derelict. He's a nonperson.

Meta me

Been trying out the mobile codes apps from Beta Labs - pretty interesting possibilities when the web merges with the real world, almost of which I haven't even begun to think about yet.

On stigmergy, ants and VRM

Joe Andrieu writes a savvy post on the VRM concept. My brain is tired from doing the requisite backflips, but happy for the workout. He relates vendor management to one of the "you know it's important but how" concepts - swarm intelligence.

This suggests that it may be easier to rearchitect supporting business systems around the user, just as we know we need to do for the consumer experiences themselves. Here the user is the local store of intelligence which vendors (and whomever else) can then interract with, and in so doing improve that user's intelligence. So, if we can get systems to learn that everytime the individual gets on a plane he takes the window seat, maybe we can infer something useful that we can use for picking seats on other modes of transport. Or maybe not - but it'd be fun to have the data to play with.

This is a natural extension for mobiles, and one that may be a counter signal to the "data is always and everywhere in the cloud" schtick. Guess what, sometimes the data can be local too.

"instead of a bunch of individuals running around leaving a disparate data trail which is hard to keep track of, the individual represents the digital environment where data is stored by vendors. When the next vendor comes along, the data is there, available for use, without the need for complex integration, processing, or systems maintenance, just like the environment is there for the next ant to come along, allowing that ant to do what they do without a complicated brain or sophisticated map of the territory.

It doesn’t matter that Doc was physically moving around in his example. From Doc’s perspective, he was always right there. “No matter where I go… there I am.” This is more than just a solipsistic view of the universe, it is perhaps the most critical insight of the VRM user-centric gestalt. When you put the user at the center, it makes it trivially easy to manage and integrate the entire digital experience of the user. Because it is all right there, all the time.

Two obvious messages here. First, we all need to do a helluva good job in getting vendors in many different industries and sectors to agree on protocols that speak consistently to their customers. And second, this is very much about the mobile industry - and we all know how good our industry is at quickly agreeing global standards. The upside here as far as I see it, is that this is more of a device story than a network story, so may be a little easier. Anyway, fun times ahead.

Internships two-point-oh

It's not been confirmed yet, but there might be a couple of internships going at Nokia this summer around the theme of Internet innovation and 2.0, to work on a few cool projects that we've got cooking and need some help. Location probably Helsinki (it's great during the summer).

It's rather late in the season for this, and I suspect most people have got their internships lined up, but if this strikes a chord, ping me at stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com, and let me know if you have any particular skills or interests that we could put to work in the spirit of transformation.

Real time transport mashup of Helsinki

This mashup - showing Finnish public transport system in REAL TIME on google maps is wonderful, and strangely addictive. (Did that bus break down? Ah, no, there it goes again.) As I am now living in London, I am painfully aware that such a transparent and technically advanced solution would be impossible here.

Learning to muzzle the legal attack dogs

Good to see that our legal department is fairly quick to move and apologize for a oversight. This incident saw one of our most passionate blog sites receive a legal threat to shut down for posting pics of a future phone (that escaped from a factory).

Some in the company have remarked that this new found agility and humbleness (we're not known for that, apparently) is proof that some of the "2.0" messages have been getting through. Either way, good to see. Cluetrain, come on in, your time is up...

Get the service right first, and figure out the techology later

Am going out for dinner tonight in London, and two savoury tastes have been swirling round my palate, competing for primacy. First was Indian (our national dish), exemplified by the excellent Bombay Bicycle Club. Second was Italian, and my sister recommended Numero Uno.

So, as a good considerate brother, I naturally prefer my own idea, and try and book a table at Bombay Bicyle Club. No such luck. Their website (kicking off with a flash movie, yuck), talks a lot about their "story", but when you go to "contact us" you get a web form. Forgedaboudit. I do find the phone number of the Balham branch under their restaurants section, but get a recorded message saying they're closed til 6:30pm. Nobody around to take orders by phone, really? Must be because they have such a sophisticated and effective online system then.

So, I try and use their whizzo online ordering capability. This is provided by Livebookings and creates a java popup to identify the slot you want which is quite cute. Unfortunately, it then requires you to register your name, ADDRESS and phone number. I already have far too many social networks requiring me to register with them, now I have to register at some obscure service (ok, used by other restaurants too) with username and password etc. They then reject my proposal because my password suggestion is not 7 characters long. Look!, I cry, this is a bloody restaurant booking service, not my bank.

After cursing and muttering about the excess of information, I get to the final submit screen, only to decide that I need to have the table half an hour earlier. OK, my bad, but these things happen. I click on Back, and everything is wiped out. As my blood pressure rockets I throw my long suffering Nokia across the room (it survives, always does) and curse loudly at the screen. And at Bombay Bicycle Club. Do they realize that they've just turned me, a long time fan of their product, into an annoyed non-customer, through the use of too much technology.

I then Google the Italian, find its phone number, call them up and book a slot. That takes me 15 seconds, and has delivered my evening's business to them, whereas all that Bombay Bicycle Club have got from me is frustration. If I had wanted to change the time, I could have done it verbally, and he'd have said - perfecto.

Underlying this is the fact that still have a long way to go before we can provide a "very human technology" experience for the management of customer service, with a big sticking point being identity and authentication. The reality is that the phone still does that job far easier and quicker than overly complicated web services. There is tremendous scope to get both of these working better by working together, and we've got some ideas for how this could happen, but if any of them involve sacrificing the experience in favour of some misguided technology vision, they deserve to fail.

The evolution of the web, according to Fido

So, according to my cerebral canine companion, my tinpot evolution of the web theory can be equally applied to dogs as well as people.

Pets.com came - and went - first. This iconic dot.bomb went from IPO to liquidition in nine months. Here your PC-savvy pooch could find information about petfood - information ruled the day.

Second, came online social networking for dogs: dogster. Here Fido can start yapping enthusiastically at other gorgeous german shepherds or touch nose to screen to nose with a winsome wippet. His vocal chords and floppy ears are given full reign, even though he may need a little help from his friends to press the buttons on the video camera to record his chat up lines.

And so now, proof of the arrival of three point oh, we have SNIFLabs - Social Networking in Fur - (no joke). This company makes cute collar attachments (and has an inspired logo) that the dogs can use as digital scent - marking their territory and people they amble into. MIT Tech Review picked them up again recently since they're launching soon (doggy cliches have been flying for the past couple of years.

It's fitting that the perenially walkie-obsessed dogs are able to break free from the tyranny of the wired PC and take social networking out to the real world before us (though don't forget Imity is already there). Perhaps it's not surprising - it's easier to be an overt networker about somebody or something else (dogs, music, hamster fanciers) rather than just yourself.

I was asked by a relative last week when are we bringing out a tracking system for people, so that she can check up where her kids are, or so people can find her if she is kidnapped while out horseriding (Hampshire being the new Gaza). This system does not use GPS, but sounds sophisticated enough to do most of what she wants. I wonder if they'll be used as kid trackers?

It used to be that on the Internet, no one would know if you were a dog. Now that the third generation of the web is cutting the chord, the dogs can prove that they are indeed dogs, and no longer need to hide behind the mice.

The obligatory 3.0 post: this time with added You-nicorn

Does it strike anyone else as odd, that just a few months after Time celebrates a new era of the empowered You, most of the chatter about the next great leap - that some are calling Web3.0 - is a paradigm shift for technology (namely the arrival of the semantic web), not the end user?

The what is web3.0? question has been stewing in my mind for a bit, and like many jargon-weary commentators I thought it best to ignore it and hope the urge would pass, since fluff to the power of fluff is just more fluff. But then the excellent and deeply credible R/WW kicked off this (tongue in cheek?) competition, so I might as well dump the contents of my 3.0 cache here for the record.

Basically, if I had to assign a numerical framework for the evolution of the web, what I'd do would be something like this:

Web1.0: Brain & Eyes (=Information)

Web2.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice & Heart (=Passion)

Web3.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice, Heart, Arms & Legs (=Freedom)

I would try and map the evolution of the web to the increasing benefits to the individual. The first breakthrough paradigm enabled by the web was information, the second was passion, the third - I would like to suggest, is freedom in the physical sense - aka mobility. In Maslowian terms, throw in a bit of food and sex, and you're basically done.

1.0 was about accessing information

From the individual's perspective, the web has progressively been about genuinely empowering them to do more and more with the things they care about. 1.0 provided the web as a disintermediater - where information was the novelty, and most of it happened to be in static text and graphic form. 1.0 was about knowing that a price is cheaper on Expedia than on the BA site, or reading about human rights abuses in China. The 1.0 poster children (eBay, Google, Amazon, Expedia and Wikipedia) allowed people to connect them with what they were interested in - such as cheap stuff and tough questions.

2.0 was about finding your passion

The arrival of You on the scene is not a passing fad. The web has always been about You, the only thing was that the You in 1.0 was deaf, mute and immobile. In 2.0 the gag came off. We started to sing, shout, dance and generally make a mockery of How Things Should Be Done. 2.0 represented another leap forward in terms of making our lives better. Bandwidths increased, allowing music then video to flow (with copyright spinning in the wind). Software and services became easier to use and companies such as mine made it easier to create and distribute content. Social networking sites allowed niche passions to connect with each other. The result is the individuals themselves started to have more fun, more sex, more life. They could perform for millions - anybody who's ever had the buzz of being on stage and adored by thousands knows how good that feels. (Apparently an Oscar nomination adds four years to your life.) YouTube has made people stars - made them sing dance, cavort, laugh, cry. Colour arrived to the binary, command-line network of networks. My simple suggestion for world peace is to play the Kiwi and Mocha videos on a big screen at the beginning of every UN security council meeting.

So, with the added emotion in our lives from the second version of the web we're really starting to be convinced that these tech guys actually are good news. Just when we're working ourselves up into a frenzy of excitement about what could be even bigger, even better for us and indeed be the Next Big Thing, along comes an old fashioned committee and tells us that the future is about resource description frameworks, web ontology language and, of course, XML.

Semantics is to Web 3.0 what horseshoes are to a unicorn
Sure, getting data to talk to data is an important step but to me it is plumbing. "WOW, you've got a flying horse, that's absolutely freaking, bloody amazing, I love it!!" is the refrain I'd like to hear as I tell people what I'm working on. Not, "A-ha, look at these nicely roughly circular, sturdy iron protective elements on the feet of the horse, I bet they're useful when it lands".

To be asked to imagine a future vision of where the web is going, and then be told that any vision is fine as long as it is semantic is rather claustrophobic. There is nobody on the planet that I think more deserving of unlimited wealth, chocolate and a permanent serenade by a chorus of angels than Tim Berners-Lee (despite him turning down our invitation to the Nokia Speaker Series when he collected his $1m cheque). However this necessary plumbing is not a sexy vision that will sell to our respective parents and kids. And as we know, sex sells.

We in the tech industry seem to be slipping back, like incurable alcoholics, to the bad habits of focusing on the technology and not the benefits of what is coming next. Of course, we know that it'd be great if microformats actually worked, and people could get more joined up services, but frankly, most of the benefits seem rather marginal compared to what we're able to do now. It's hard to package and sell it to Average Joe. For example, Wikipedia suggests as a use case that "a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings". Hmmm, anybody spot a geek in the vicinity? This would probably be to Joe just an incremental improvement in Google's already fabulous problem-solving offering. And also, it neglects that fact that people would probably still trust the recommendation of their friend over any semantic goodness. Digitizing relationships and reputations has proven to be particularly challenging.

3.0 will be about finding your legs, and your wings

So, 3.0 to me is more about taking what we had so far and extending the reach - both physically in terms of another dimension, but also in terms of imagination. Letting you do what you do today on the web but when you're mobile is the first necessary step - table stakes - for this, and for that we have browsers, widg/sets and AJAX integration. But a lot of that is not new innovation, just necessary replication. What I'm looking for in 3.0 is the truly breakthrough user experiences that hit you in the stomach, the way that using Google did the first time you used it, or the way that Mocha's little legs wiggled in a furry flurry of happiness. That I can safely say is not shrinking today's internet service du jour and putting it on the small screen, but using the vast amounts of new data sources in innovative ways to create new and improved experiences. Mobile social networking, avatars, maps, mashups, music, marketing and The Man will all I suspect play a part in building this. We've got some pretty cool ideas but part of the fun is not knowing what services will prove to be the most successful.

This is in essence the point of this blog - it's ThreeDimensionalPeople, people. Add a third dimension (and a fourth, courtesy of RSS) and the possibilities for innovation multiply. Unfortunately, some parts of the telco industry seems unable to allow the speed and scope of innovation required, so it will be provided in due time by others many of whom are both willing and able.

So in summary, I think we need our politicians, business people, relatives, academics and shop floor workers to get behind our vision for where we're going next and get excited about the possibilities about what it can do for them. Sure, the €100bn orgy of excess of 3G was painful, but just because one entire industry collectively overpaid, overpromised and underdelivered on a set of mistaken assumptions has nothing to do with the reality of what an Internet set free of wires could become. The mobile device plus the Internet has the potential to revolutionize our lives in ways that we haven't begun to dream about, and I suggest, deserves significantly more attention from our entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are striving to build new new things, whether they come with a number attached or not.

Man, I wonder how much they'd be making without that pesky Internet?

The current issue of Booz Allen's Strategy & Business magazine contains some interesting data points - salutory reading for those who might think that the web has dismembered industry as we know it:

Companies are sitting on mountains of cash, much more than they need. Holdings
at NYSE- and Nasdaq-listed companies topped a record $2.7 trillion in 2005, and
they are growing at 24 percent annually. By industry, the largest cash increases
in the past decade were in media (1,700 percent), utilities (1,360 percent), and
telecommunications (1,300 percent).

Some principles for good data management

As companies around the world wake up to the new reality that the web flattens the playing field and offers more choices for people than they had before, there is realization that being customer-centric is probably a Good Thing. The next logical conclusion therefore it seems is the need to amass vast mounds of data about their customers, mine it every which way and that, in order to better understand people's behaviour. This has been fuelled by a Google paranoia, in which companies tremble if they don't have a data centre the size of Kansas tracking every possible thing that you, me, and them could, would, should, or might do sometime, yesterday or tomorrow.

My concern is that, as with the environement, the real costs of data collection and not externalized, and so business and governments have little incentive to act responsibly with this data. In addition to my suggestion that the provider is rarely compensated adequately for the potentially interesting uses of their data, the costs of storage continue to plummet, resulting in a simple equation for most managers - grab as much data as you can and hang on to it.

In Europe, data collection has been a hot-button issue for a while with more stringent safeguards on collecting and protecting user data than in the US. (I remember during my time working at Siebel an 'interesting' meeting between one of our more assertive West coast salesmen and an official from a French ministry. The concept of the CRM system that this hapless salesman was attempting to foist on the French government to better manage their citizenry was, we were told in no uncertain terms - illegal. It is against the law in France for this government department to share data on citizens with another department. Clearly, not great news for the efficiency levels and problem solving abilities of the French bureaucrats, and not great for the salesman.) Anyway, if there's money to be made, savvy business people will gravitate to the least cost option, so probably base their policies in the most amenable jurisdictions.

This to say that there should probably be some principles or code of conduct, to use a phrase du jour, for how companies manage their customer data. Kim Cameron's laws of identity seem to be the gold standard here, and are rather related, but not the same.

In conversation recently with a smart chap at one of the great British institutitions (didn't tell him I would blog it, so won't say which one), he outlined his principles about data collection that their organization uses. I noted them down rather quickly, and here is the list (a bit mangled as I'm taking a bit of translator's license here).

1. Ownership: The data about the user is owned by the individual, and companies are able to borrow it and use it to provide better services for the user, while they have a relationship with that user.
2. Minimum: Only collect the minimal data required to deliver certain functions: i.e. "just in time not just in case". So a vendor only needs to collect enough data to know that you have enough money to pay for the goods, and they don't need to hang on to it when you're gone.
3. Modular: The service doesn't need to have an all-or-nothing approach to data for it to work -- the data can be separated and functional with different uses.
4. Tradeable: Data can be used to interact with other services, if you have agreed that it can be shared with them to improve your service. Clearly, generic data such as location has multiple uses, whereas specific proprietary application data has more limited uses.
5. Tangible: It is clear what impact your data has on the system, and whether it's being used to impact the service level that you're receiving.
6. Extractable: You can remove all elements of your data from their system. This is something that Google is apparently doing, which I think is tremendous. Like their search engine, they are happy to send people away, not try and hang onto them if they don't want to be there.

I'd be interested to see other principles relating to good data management - this is now the time to shape people's opinions towards what is still a rather abstract issue, but which is increasingly becoming the cause for debate. And profits.

Three out of four kids would like targeted ads on their mobile

Tomi T. A. points to an interesting recent finding.

Q Research is reported in this week's issue of New Media Age (April 19, 2007)
with a survey of 1,500 UK youth aged 11 - 20. When asked simply - do you
accept ads to your mobile, the survey found 32% willing to
accept. Then when asked - would the youth be willing to accept ads that are
about their areas of interest, this jumps to 71%. Then, when
asked if the ads offer discounts and coupons, it goes up again, to 76%. And finally - this is the eye-opener - if the youth
is asked if the ads would give them top-ups to their prepaid phone accounts, 84% say yes, such ads would be welcome...

Good news, but the real innovators in this space are not waiting for validation before they take ideas that they think are good enough to the market. I think it's time for these discussions to move from the theoretical to the practical.